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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS, 



EDINBURGH : PRINTED BY THOMAS CONSTABLE, 
FOB 

EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. 

LONDON HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. 

CAMBRIDGE, MACMILLAN AND CO. 

DUBLIN, . . ... M'GLASHAN AND GILL. 

GLASGOW, JAMES MACLEHOSE. 



ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS 



AN ANALYTICAL ESSAY 



BY 



:J^ 



SIMON s/lAUKIE, 

ATTTHOR OF ' FUNDAMEXTAL DOCTEIXE OF LATIN SYNTAX, BEING AN 
APPLICATION OF PSYCHOLOGY TO LANGUAGE.' 



EDINBUEGH 
EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS 

186 6. 






In Exchange 
Brown University 
JUL 1^ 



1934 






CONTENTS. 



IXTEODUCTION, ....... 1 

CHAPTER I. 

Attempt to separate the essential characteristic of the sa- called 
' Conscience ' or ' Moral Sense. ' It is a ' Feeling of Com- 
placence and Displacence ' at least, whatever else it may be, . 7 

CHAPTER II. 

Is the Feeling of Complacency or Displacency a Discriminator of 
Rightness in Acts? If not, what is the discriminating cri- 
terion ? . . . . . . . .10 

CHAPTER III. 

Explanation of the sense in which the phrase * Happiness of Man ' 

is used in this Essay, . . . . . . .20 

CHAPTER IV. 

What is the Criterion of the Right and Wrong in Subjective or 

Intransitive Acts ? . . . . . .27 

CHAPTER V. 

Ends and Motives. — The Felicity of ]SIan the end and criterion of 

Transitive as well as Intransitive Acts, . . . .38 



vi CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PAGE 

Controversion of the Doctrine that the Eight is discriminated by 

an arbitrary, inner Sense, . . . . .47 



CHAPTEK VII. 

Distinction between the Rightness of the Act, and the Morality or 
Goodness of the Agent; the words ' appro vable, ' 'right,' 
'wrong,' etc., . . . . . . .58 

CHAPTER VIIT. 

The Sanctions of the Right. The real nature of Moral Energi2dng. 
Essential Antagonism of Right and Wrong. Self, WiU, Virtue, 
Merit. Sympathy and Approbation of Men. Communion with, 
and Approbation by, God. Sense of Law, Duty, and Obliga- 
tion, . . . . . . . .63 

CHAPTER IX. 

On the Sense of Inner Law, . . . . . .77 

CHAPTER X. 
The Immutability of Morality, . . . . .90 

CHAPTER XI. 

The Moral Sentiments, . . . . . .97 

CHAPTER XII. 

On the Gradation of Felicities and Sentiments, and on the Supremacy 

of the Sentiment of Justice, . . . . .103 



CONTENTS. 



VU 



The Supreme Good, 



CHAPTER XIII. 



PAGE 

108 



On Justice, . 



CHAPTER XIV. 



115 



CHAPTER XV. 

Statement of Relative Position, 



139 



EREATA. 



P. 13, line 9 from foot, /or ' to, 'reac? 'in addition to.' 

P. 17, line 11 from foot, /or 'Without attempting,' read 'Without 

attempting in this chapter.' 
P. 35, delete footnote. 
P. 48, last line, delete semicolon at 'facts.' 
P. 49, line 1, for 'affirms,' 7'ead 'affirm.' 



' Omnis Auctoritas Philosopliiae consistit in beata vita 
comparauda : beate enim vivendi cupiditate incensi omnes 
snmus.' — Cic. De Fin. v. 29. 



'It is easy for a false hypothesis to maintain some 
appearance of truth while it keeps wholly in generals, 
makes use of undefined terms, and employs comparisons 
instead of instances.' — From David Hume's Essay con- 
cerning Moral Sentiments. 



INTEODIJCTIOK 



That a man ought to will and do the right, the 
good, the approvable, the virtuous act, is the com 
mon starting-point of all writers on the principles of 
morality. The question round which discussion has 
mainly turned is. How shall a man know that the act 
presumed to be right, good, and virtuous, is really so ? 
What test or touchstone shall be applied to the will- 
ing and acting of men whereby the rightness or 
wrongness, the goodness or badness, of a motive or 
act shall be revealed ? In other words, ' What is the 
measure or criterion of acts or states of the wall 
in respect of rightness ? ' This mode of putting the 
question is, it seems to me, preferable to the more 
usual phrase, * What is the Criterion of morality,' be- 
cause the word " morality' is of varying and indefinite 
signification, and may be so used as to confound, if 
not sometimes to beg, the question at issue : at the 
same time, as it is legitimate to substitute the word 
' acts,' in its larger and proper meaning, for ' states of 
the will,' the question may be also put thus : 

' What is the criterion of rightness in acts ? ' 

A 



1 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

That the question is an important one in its 
psychological relations, no less than in its practical 
bearing on human life and duty, is evident from the 
interest attached to the discussion of it from a remote 
past till now. 

It involves prior questions as to the nature and 
circumstances of the being whose acts we desire to 
test. It presumes that we already have a psycho- 
logy, if not completed, at least approximately correct 
in aU essential respects. And not only so : it also 
presumes a general consent on anthropology ; for 
we cannot afford to omit from our argument the 
physical relations, ethnological influences, and outward 
history of the race. With these data we may approach 
the specific moral question. The answer to it will of 
necessity react on our presumed anthropology, not 
merely completing it, but giving it a fresh significance 
by shedding light on its phenomena. An anthropology 
(which term is used as comprehending psychology) 
happily exists ready to our hand, not certainly com- 
pleted in the scientific sense, even as regards those 
phenomena which lie outside the moral sphere, but 
adequate to our purpose, because furnishing a classifi- 
cation of the phenomena of receptivity and activity, 
which, as a popular statement, obtains the general 
assent. 

That man feels, knows, and wills ; that vdth the 
knowing, the feeling, and the willing, there are associ- 
ated phenomena of consciousness, which we designate 
as pleasure and pain ; that pleasure and pain belong 



INTRODUCTION. 6 

to tlie active as well as to the receptive feelings ; 
that these feelings may be fairly viewed under the 
various denominations — physical, appetitive, social, 
aesthetic, moral, and religious; that by 'moral' feel- 
ings are designated certain internal phenomena which 
arise in consciousness, in association with the doing of 
the just, the right, the benevolent, and the beautiful 
act ; that by ' religious' feelings are designated those 
internal phenomena which arise when the individual 
contemplates the idea of God, and his own relations 
to Him. These statements regarding the nature- of man 
receive the general assent, and thus we are enabled to 
enter on the question of the ' Criterion of a man's acts ' 
without waiting for a complete analysis of his nature ; 
nay, such an analysis is seen to be impossible until 
this question as to the principles of morality has 
itself been considered. The ultimate nature, the 
genesis, the simplicity or complexity of the pheno- 
mena, which have been enumerated, are subjects of 
separate inquiry, coming, it is true, within the proper 
sphere of a treatise on morals, but not obstructing the 
discussion of the introductory question as to the test, 
measure, or criterion of the right or wrong in acts 
or states of vnll. 

There are substantially only two answers attempted 
to the primary question in morals, though both have 
been presented in forms modified by the idiosyncrasy 
of their expounders, or the circumstances of the times 
in which they were promulgated. 



4 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

(l.) That the only criterion of acts is theu^ ten- 
dency to promote the happiness or well-being of 
mankind, is the thesis of one school of thought/ 
This thesis by implication seems to affirm that the 
character of an act can be known, and the criterion 
applied, only by following the act into its conse- 
quences, immediate and remote, on all mankind whom 
it can possibly affect. The extreme form of this 
theory is aptly called Utilitarianism. In its extreme 
form, however, it misrepresents itself. Its position 
seems to me to be adequately stated by John Austin 
as foUows : — 

'Inasmuch as the goodness of God is boundless 
and impartial. He designs the greatest happiness of 
all His sentient creatures ; He wills that the aggre- 
gate of their enjoyments shall find no nearer limit 
than that which is inevitably set to it by their finite 
and imperfect nature. From the probable effects of 
our actions on the greatest happiness of all, or from 
the tendencies of human actions to increase or dimi- 
nish that aggregate, we may infer the laws which He 
has given, but has not expressed or revealed. 

'Now the tendency of a human action (as its 
tendency is thus understood) is the whole of its 
tendency ; the sum of its probable consequences in 
so far as they are important or material ; the sum of 
its remote and collateral as well as of its direct con- 
sequences, in so far as any of its consequences may 

^ Although Utilitarianism and ancient Epicureanism have a substan- 
tial basis of resemblance, they are not to be confounded. 



INTRODUCTION. O 

influence the general happiness.'"^ 'The happiness/ 
says Mr. J. S. Mill, 'which forms the Utilitarian 
standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's 
own happiness, but that of all concerned.'^ 

(2.) That the test or criterion of acts is a moral 
sense existing in each individual, and generally called 
' Conscience,' which pronounces instantaneously and 
clearly on the rightness or wrongness of every act, is 
the thesis of the opposing school. This thesis, by 
implication, afiirms that there is in man a special 
faculty which is neither the intellect nor any combina- 
tion of ordinary feelings, and that this distinguishes 
the nature of acts, and issues mandates as to conduct. 

There have been numerous modifications of the 
second Theory, which are all to be traced to the 
'psychological views of those who maintain them, and 
the extent to which intellect is recognised as an 
element in the moral judgment. Bishop Warburton 
has perhaps given expression to the theory in its most 
thoroughgoing form ; for after saying that every 
animal is endowed with an instinct to direct it to its 
greatest good, he says that man also has his specific 
instinct, which is called the moral sense, 'whereby 
we conceive and feel a pleasure in right and a dis- 
taste and aversion to wrong, prior to all reflection on 
their natures or their consequences' {Div. Leg. i. 4). 
'Man,' says Bishop Butler, 'has the rule of right 
within ; what is wanting is only that he attend to 
it.' Again, he says, ' The principle of reflection or 

' Pro virxe of Jurisprudence, vol. i. p. 32. 2 Utilitarianism, p. 24. 



6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

conscience distinguishes between the internal prin- 
ciples of his heart as well as his external actions ; 
passes judgment on himself and them ; pronounces 
determinately some actions to be just, right, good ; 
others to be in themselves evil, wrong, unjust : which 
without being consulted, without being advised 
magisterially exerts itself and approves or condemns 
him, the doer of them, accordingly/ Again, he says, 
* Let any plain, honest man, before he engages in any 
course of action, ask himself : " Is this I am ofoinof 
about right or is it wrong ? Is it good or is it evil ? " 
I do not in the least doubt but that this question 
would be answered agreeably to truth and virtue by 
almost any fair man in any circumstances.' 



CHAPTER I. 

Attcmiot to separate the essential characteristic of the so-called 
'Conscience' or 'Moral Sense! It is a ' Feeling of Gom- 
^ plcccence and Displacence' at least, ivhatever else it may he. 

All men succeed to an inheritance of precepts or 
rules of conduct which are either the results of the 
self-analysis of preceding generations, or of their 
experience of those things which tend to the security, 
the stability, and general well-being of the race. 
These take the form of the unwritten common-law 
of morality or of written statute, and to these have 
to be added the precepts which have their origin and 
sanction in religion. In the great majority of acts 
the individual measures both motive and act by their 
conformity or non-conformity to the traditional code 
into which he has been thus born, and up to which 
he has been educated. The perception of agreement 
or disagreement with this code is that moral percep- 
tion which he considers to be the chief, but not the 
only function of the faculty which he somewhat in- 
definitely calls ^ conscience.' And it is unquestionable 
that in this signification, — the signification of a 
repertory of ready-made precepts and rules, each man 
has a 'conscience' accusing or else excusing him. 



8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

The fundamental question of ethics has, however, no 
concern with this consolidation of human experience. 
For, that this ' conscience' with all the precepts which 
it comprehends is manifestly derivative not primary- 
is practically admitted by the most competent thinkers 
in both schools of ethics ; it is itself, in truth, the very 
object of investigation. What gives vahdity to these 
moral generalizations and sentiments which are 
generally accepted, and which govern human con- 
duct ? — this is precisely the question at issue. 

Again, associated indissolubly with the current 
stock of moralities which is vulgarly called ^con- 
science' is the feeling of Duty and Obligation, and this 
again by common consent of both schools. There is 
no immediate question as to the fact of duty and 
obligation, but only as to the test, standard or criterion 
of duty, and further as to the genesis and history of 
the sense of obligation and duty. For in an inquiry 
into the criterion of acts we have not to do with the 
notions which are signified by the words merits virtue^ 
honour, and their conjugates, although they form part 
of the general philosophy of ethics. Even the question 
of the existence of a distinct faculty called the moral 
sense or conscience constantly obtrudes itself and 
claims consideration only because there is, as we have 
already said, a philosophic use of the terms opposed 
to the vulgar acceptation of them, according to which 
they must signify, if they signify anything, an ultimate 
inexplicable and non-reasoning sentiment which 
marks out the ultimate right from the ultimate wrong 



THE MOEAL SENSE. 9 

with unerring precision, and in this way furnishes 
the moral criterion or test which men are in search 
of. 

Now the doctrine that * conscience' or a 'moral 
sense ' discriminates between the right and wrong in 
acts and motives, must mean that there arises a feel- 
ing of complacency or displacency as soon as the 
intellect takes note of an act, or becomes cognizant of 
a state of will. This feeling of complacency or dis- 
placency when contemplated by the intellect, takes 
the form of approval or disapproval of the act as being 
'right' or 'wrong.' The 'moral sense' may mean 
much more than this, but this at least it must mean ; 
and as the fact of moral judgment on acts is not 
denied by any school of thought, and as, moreover, it 
is this conspicuous phenomenon that first fills the 
eye when we regard the general questions of ethics, 
we may fairly proceed on our inquiiy from this 
common starting-point. 



CHAPTER 11. 

Is the Feeling of Complaceney or Displacency a Discriminator 
of Rightness in Acts? If not, what is the discriminating 
criterion t 

It is manifest that intellect necessarily comes into 
play in order to enable iis to discern ttie existence as 
well as the characteristics of any act presented to us 
for moral judgment, and is thus prior in its operation 
to the feeling of complacency or displacency which we 
have already identified (provisionally at least) with 
the ' moral sense ; ' and that intellect again comes upon 
the stage after complacency or displacency has been 
experienced, in order to give effect to the feeling by 
means of a judgment and its corresponding affirma- 
tion. There is no instrument whereby a man can 
know an act, as such, save the intellect ; and again, 
there is no instrument whereby he can pronounce judg- 
ment, save the intellect. To speak of the 'moral sense' 
as if it v/ere a knowing or judging faculty, is therefore 
an abuse of language. The feeling, which is presumed 
by the intuitive school to determine the rightness of 
an act or motive, must intervene between two opera- 
tions of the intellect — the operation of knowing, and 
the operation of judging and affirming. The 'con- 



THE DISCRIMINATION OF KIGHTNESS. 1 1 

science ' or ' moral sense/ as a criterion of the right 
in acts or states of will, accordingly, shows itself to 
be (whatever else it may be) a feeling of complacency 
and displacency standing between tivo intellectual 
operations. This localizing of the feeling is not unim- 
portant. The question now assumes this form : — 

Is the complacency or approbation, which the right 
act unquestionably excites, itself also the discriminator 
of the rightness of the act ? or, is it only a conse- 
quence of the perception of the rightness '? If only a 
consequence, what are the grounds on which the judg- 
ment of rightness (which is followed by complacence) 
is pronounced ? 

But before proceeding to answer this question, let 
us again obviate misunderstandings, by distinguishing 
between the ' conscience ' or ' moral sense,' which as a 
discriminator of the moral quality of acts, has a quasi- 
substantial and practically real existence in all men, 
and the moral sense in the philosophic use of the 
term. In the former signification, we find that every 
civilized man inevitably has his mind, stored with a 
collection of moral generalizations in the form of pre- 
cepts and rules which constitute its furniture, and un- 
questionably feels with almost instantaneous rapidity 
the quality of the great majority of acts. The discern- 
ing intellect presents acts for judgment as one of a class 
already adjudged in respect of rightness or wrongness 
in some other way. But with a conscience so equipped 
and provided, through the experience of generations. 



12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

with a delegate in the intellect, which holds in readiness 
for instant application, the classifications, generaliza- 
tions, and rules which are required in common daily use, 
we have nothing to do here ; but only with the moral 
sense in its primitive and rudimentary effort to con- 
nect the admitted feeling of complacency or dis- 
placency with some specific and as yet unfamiliar act. 

As the first step in our progress, then, let us 
endeavour to substitute notions, precise and parti- 
cular, in the room of vague and general, by recon- 
sidering the doctrine of the moral sense (in that 
one of its elements which we have up to this point 
been able to detect) in accordance with the method of 
instances. It is probable, that by condescending to a 
method too much neglected in ethical disquisition, we 
may not only reach a clearer conception of the nature 
of the feeling of complacency, but also be able to 
answer the question — whether this feeling be itself a 
Discriminator of rightness in acts, or only a conse- 
quence of the discrimination of rightness. 

The primeval savage, as yet but partially ac- 
quainted with the kind with which he herds, sees, we 
shall suppose, for the first time, one man abstract 
another man's axe. He cannot remain an indifferent 
spectator of this. He pronounces some judgment 
on it, articulate or inarticulate. But that judgment 
may amount to nothing more than the affirmation of 
the fact that the axe has been taken away. If it 
amounts to more than this— to a judgment that the 
abstraction was wrong, censurable, bad — how does 



THE GROUNDS OF COMPLACENCY. 13 

he come at this ? Manifestly thus : his sympathy 
enables him to imagine his own axe abstracted, and 
the consequent pain of a loss and a personal injury 
which this would cause in him, — feelings which 
would be followed by the emotion of anger and by 
resistance ; that is to say, the abstraction, folloived into 
its consequences, would cause the pain of a loss in him, 
were he himself the sufferer; and, in addition to this, the 
pain of personal right outraged, and the further conse- 
quent feelings of anger and resistance. Until the act 
could be followed into these its consequences on the 
individual against whom it Avas done, there could be no 
judgment on the aggression save the judgment 'that 
the axe was taken/ These feelings of pain at depri- 
vation, and of rights infringed, which he recognises as 
possible in himself, the spectator transfers to the 
sufferer, and so pronounces the act of the abstractor 
to be wrong and bad. The act itself is morally 
nothing till its completion is traced out and clearly 
discerned by the intellect. When to the personal 
injury of the immediate sufferer extending experience 
reveals the numerous evils which the practice of such 
acts would inflict on society at large, — that is to say 
(for it is essential to avoid vague terms), on all other 
men as well as on the first sufferer, our feelings are 
multiplied by the number of possible sufferers, and 
acquire a greater intensity. Where is the ' moral 
sense^ here ? Exclude the antecedent and succeeding 
operation of the understanding, and in the residuum 
somewhere we must look for the moral sense. 



14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

But the residuum is not a simple feeling, but seve- 
ral feelings. There is the pain of deprivation, which 
is equivalent to the pain of a desire unsatisfied ; there 
is the pain of personality (or personal rights) infringed ; 
there are the emotion of anger and the act of resist- 
ance. But if we exclude the term ' personal rights,' 
the higher class of irrational animals have manifestly 
the same movements of feeling in similar circum- 
stances. There is in them also the pain of a loss, and 
along with this a feeling of displacency with the cause 
of the pain, which may and does rouse to anger. In 
what, at this initial stage of contact with other powers 
outside himself, consists the difference between man 
and the irrational animals ? In this : man, by virtue 
of his self-consciousness, detains the feelings which we 
have described in his consciousness, afiirms ' the pain- 
ful' of each of them, and affirms, moreover, his 
displacency with the agent who has caused this dis- 
turbance of the ease of the sufferer. 

The ' moral sense,' then, in so far as it differs from 
the emotions of the irrational creation, seems to do 
so by virtue of self-consciousness alone, and is thus 
reduced to the knowledge and the intellectual affir- 
mation ov judgment of displacency towards the offen- 
der, — in other words, of disapprobation of him. But 
we had reached this point some pages back. Has the 
transference of the argument from the general to the 
concrete taught us nothing new, and served only to 
confirm what probably no one denies ? It has done 
more than this : for we are now in a position to see 



THE GROUNDS OF COMPLACENCY. 15 

that the moral adverse judgment is a purely intellectual 
act, proceeding upon a feeling of repulsion against 
some person or act (for the act and agent are not at 
this stage distinguished) because of some 2^ctin luhich 
can he traced to him or to it. 

When the man thus judging has first occasion to 
judge his oivn conduct, he simply transfers the earlier 
mode of procedure to himself, objectivizes himself 
when his passions are allayed, and estimates himself 
from the point of view of a spectator. 

Here, then, we have before us the modus operandi 
of a primitive judgment on what we presume to be 
one of the earliest acts of man against man, — a judg- 
ment formed when language itself had yet to be sought 
for, in order to express the mental emotion. And to 
what extent does the inner history above sketched de- 
termine the character of the moral sense ? It brings us 
to the conclusion with which by anticipation we began 
this chapter ; for it seems to me that (when we gene- 
ralize the phenomena) there are only two stages in the 
above mental history which are not operations of the 
understanding, viz., the feeling of pain and the feeling 
of displacency. On the feeling of displacency, therefore, 
we again put our finger, as constituting (so far as we yet 
see) ' the moral sense' as it first emerges in the mind 
of the uninstructed and undisciplined man, or in the 
minds of our own children. This feeling is followed 
by an intellectual judgment of displacency, and that 
again finds expression in such words of disapprobation 



16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

as the progress of speech may at the time afford. 
Further, we found another and a prior feeling which 
constitutes the ground of this feeling of displacency — 
the feeling, namely, of pain consequent on the agres- 
sive act of which we disapprove : pain in our own 
person, or sympathetically experienced in the person 
of another. It follows that complacency with and ap- 
probation of an act rest on the experience of pleasure 
or felicity, arising out of it to ourselves or another. 

We have confined our view hitherto to acts of a 
particular kind — namely, those acts which pass from 
an agent and affect others than himself. But it is 
necessary (all the more necessary that the distinction 
is almost invariably overlooked in ethical writings) to 
keep steadily in view that there are two classes of acts 
and of states of will for which it is our business to find 
a criterion — those which immediately and by intention 
affect other men than the agent, and which, therefore, 
may be aptly designated Transitive ; and those which 
terminate in the agent himself, only mediately and 
incidentally touching others, and which, therefore, may 
be designated Intransitive. The former class is that 
which we have as yet exclusively considered ; and it 
may here be observed that while those who profess 
the Utilitarian creed have limited their reasoning 
chiefly to this class, thereby narrowing the scope of 
their argument, their basis of morality and their theory 
of Obligation, those who have maintained the theory 
of a discriminating: Conscience have confined their 



J 



INTRANSITIVE ACTS. I 7 

analysis too exclusively to a consideration of the morality 
and merit of agents. The source of this confusion we 
shall afterwards have occasion to trace to the confound- 
ing of Eightness and Morality, Acts and Agents. 

The will of man is constantly being moved, or 
moving itself, towards the possession of felicities, 
which, as we have said, are commonly generalized 
under the various heads of Physical, Appetitive, 
Social, Intellectual, -^Esthetic, Moral, and Eeligious. 
Of the large variety of willings and actings thus pos- 
sible to the individual, the social alone primarily affect 
his fellow- men. Yet the indulgence of any or all of 
these manifold activities and capacities must be subject 
to law ; they have to be regulated as a condition of 
healthy life, or rather of life in any shape whatsoever. 
A criterion of the Eight, therefore, is in the Intransi- 
tive sphere as indispensable as in the Transitive ; and 
the 'Moral Sense' is again called upon in this new 
sphere to exhibit its Complacency or Displacency. 

Without attempting to determine by what instru- 
ment the moral agent discriminates the Eight when 
he finds his will assailed, at one and the same moment, 
by desires physical, appetitive, aesthetic, or religious, 
it requires no argument to establish the fact that the 
mental phenomenon which is the most prominent 
attendant on the act which he does, or purposes to 
do, is Complacency or Displacency with self. If 
this be not the ' moral sense,' it is, in Intransitive as 
in Transitive acts and states of will, always a large, 
and certainly the most conspicuous, element in it. 



18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

Whether, through this self-complacency, the rightness 
of the act elected to be done is in some mysterious 
way discriminated ; or whether the discrimination of 
the right is (as in the case of Transitive acts) effected 
through certain prior conditions — a feeling of felicity 
or it may be an inscrutable utterance of law — is an 
ulterior question. 

Without anticipating the answer to this question, 
which is so vitally related to the whole subject which 
now engages us as to require not only separate treat- 
ment, but some preliminary investigations, there is no 
doubt that, with regard to Intransitive as well as to 
Transitive acts, the Utilitarian and the * Moral Sense' 
theorist will agree in recognising the feeling of Com- 
placency or Displacency with self as a characteristic 
of the mental condition which follows the doing or 
purposing of any specific act, although the latter may 
not accept it as by any means an exhaustive statement 
of what he understands by the moral sense. This, at 
least, we may again, in this new connexion, affirm. 

The question now assumes to us this shape : Is the 
rightness of an Intransitive act discriminated and 
determined in, by, and through the act of Com- 
placency with self or another? If not, by what 
means do we discern the rightness of an act or pur- 
pose ? Is the discernment an instinctive and inscrut- 
able act of intelligence ? Or does a mysterious 
sentiment of law attach itself to certain acts, thereby 
indicating their rightness? Or, finally, is the right- 



THE QUESTION. 19 

ness of an act discriminated and determined by its 
tendency to produce felicity in the agent ? 

With these queries we must pause for a brief space 
while we encounter and remove from our path certain 
preliminary obstacles which seem to prevent opposiDg 
schools from narrowing the issue between them, and 
thereby rendering a mutual understanding possible. 



CHAPTER III. 

Explanation of the sense in ivliich the phrase ' Happiness of 
Mom' is used in this Essay. 

Our fiirtlier inquiry will be much facilitated if we 
at tliis stage eliminate certain elements of confusion 
from tlie question — confusion mainly due to tlie ex- 
treme language which opposite schools of thought 
have indulged in, and to the fact that the language 
of ethics has to sustain the wear and tear of col- 
loquial use. 

And first : It is almost superfluous to say that no 
unprejudiced reasoner will misunderstand the word 
' Utilitarian/ though he may regret the uses to which 
it has been applied. The term is defiant, and there- 
fore false. At best, after the most anxious explanation 
and hedging, it is inept and inadequate, save as an 
exponent of the position of an ultra-materialistic 
school. As employed by the modern Utilitarians in 
this country, however, it is merely a bad but short 
way of expressing their standard of morality, 'the 
promotion of the happiness of mankind.^ It does not, 
therefore, necessarily exclude the happiness, which is 
due to the satisfaction of the imagination, of the moral 



MOEAL HAPPINESS. 21 

and religious sentiments, or of the intellectual facul- 
ties. There is no reason why it should not include 
all of these. 

(2.) The word 'happiness' is constantly employed 
by both schools of ethics to mean that state of rounded 
self-complacency, of peace or content which in com- 
mon speech it is correctly used to denote. In moral 
discussions, however, it properly means that prepon- 
derance of the happy over the unhappy, of the 
pleasurable over the painful ; which, it is alleged, 
points out the right course of action and sustains the 
moral agent in choosing it. The virtuous effort, for 
example, of Socrates to be true to himself at the risk 
of life and many other unquestionable felicities which 
it w^as legitimate to love, was an effort in which pain 
— the pain of desires repressed, of friendships fore- 
gone, of death encountered — certainly was present, 
though subdued by the dominant sense of happiness 
which the lofty ideas of which he was the martyr 
yielded to him. ' Happiness in the sense of complete 
unbroken content is not (or ought not to be) pro- 
pounded by modern Utilitarians as the criterion of 
morality, but only happiness in the sense of the 
greatest hapj)iness possible for a man in any 
crisis of conduct — or when his will is suspended 
between two courses of action/ If the word ' happi- 
ness' be so understood, much logomachy and vain 
disputing will be ejected from moral analytics. We 
prefer to use a word less likely to be misunderstood, 
and we shall accordingly substitute ' Felicity,' which 



22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

lias the further minor advantage of a convenient 
plural form. 

(3.) The third source of confusion is one of even 
more moment than those abeady adverted to. It is 
to be found in the words used to express the moral 
standard of modern Utilitarians, namely, * the happi- 
ness or well-being of mankind.' It is not here alleged 
that Utilitarians do not employ these words with 
a perfect understanding of their import ; but this is 
certain, that, in the course of their ethical argument 
they are constantly giving a double meaning to the 
phrase, by using it sometimes as an equivalent for the 
happiness of men in the mass, sometimes as an equi- 
valent for the ' happiness or well-being of Man as an 
individual.' Having ascertained that which the consti- 
tution of Man affirms to be his best moral condition, I, 
as a moral agent, am further bound to consider my fellow- 
men generally, and so to act wliile pursuing my own 
well-being as, in the^r^^ place, not to limit the action 
of other men ; and in the second, so as to promote the 
attainment by them of that which I have ascertained 
to constitute my well-being, or rather the well-being of 
Man. If asked what I mean by the well-being of *Man ' 
as distinguished from the conception of his personal 
well-being which any particular individual mayerringly 
or wilfully form, I can only point to the norm of 
humanity which all speculation presumes to have a 
notional existence — the man of psychology as distin- 
guished from any individual. Now if by the ' happi- 
ness or well-being of mankind^ or men,' the Utilitarian 



HAPPINESS OF MAN. 23 

does not mean the well-being of man as psychology 
reveals and defines Mm, he manifestly makes the 
criterion of the rightness of an individnars act to be 
the pleasurable sensations which it arouses in the 
recipients of the act. He thus makes morahty dependent 
on the voices of the multitude, — a test which at all 
epochs of the world's history would have constituted 
those acts right which all the wisest denounce as wrong. 
Improbable as this may sound, a little consideration 
will show it to be the fact. But if the Utilitarian 
means that the test of morality is the well-being of 
Man as his nature and constitution are revealed to 
us by experience and analysis, the phrase ' well- 
being of mankind' ought, as a criterion of acts, 
to be confined to the Distribution of that happiness 
which has already been ascertained to be the best 
condition of man. The phrase as it is commonly 
employed can furnish no test of the right to a moral 
agent in respect of his w^hole conduct, but at best 
only in respect of those out-going acts which afiect 
others. But before he comes to the consideration of 
these, that which constitutes human happiness or 
well-l)eing is presumed to be already known through 
the analysis of the norm of man. 

That Utilitarians unconsciously take advantage of 
the above favourable interpretation of their theory, 
while by not explicitly adopting it, because of its 
tending to subvert other portions of their system, 
they introduce a painful and vexatious confusion into 
their argument, and furnish weapons to their oppo- 



24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

nents, are facts sufficiently obvious to all who peruse 
their writings with attention. The criterion of the right 
and desirable consequently becomes confounded mth the 
criterion of the right distribution of right and desirable 
things. Justice and benevolence usurp the whole 
field of morality ; nay, when they come to their 
theory of obligation, even benevolence and all In- 
transitive moralities are necessarily excluded from the 
category of the obligatory, and morahty and justice 
are inextricably identified. Now, 'to promote the 
well-being of men,' when properly defined, can only 
mean Ho regulate those of our acts which directly 
or indirectly afi'ect others benevolently and justly;' 
that is to say, in such a way as to give others a full 
and rio^htful share of that well-beino- which we have 
already ascertained by personal introspection and 
experience of human life, to be truly the well-being 
of Man and om^ own well-being. 

To the confusion which we have now brought into 
view is to be traced the wide acceptance as a test of 
conduct of the celebrated phrase, ' The gTeatest happi- 
ness of the greatest number.' This test, however 
valuable in the field of practical legislation, can never 
be a standard of the right act but only of the right 
distribution of certain thino-s ascertained to be rioht 
and felicitous. Those who have, perhaps too ghbly, 
employed this party ciy, have forgotten to ask the 
prior question, ' By what means, test or criterion shall 
we ascertain wherein the happiness of the greatest 
number consists ?' The true 'happiness of the greatest 



HAPPINESS OF MAN. 25 

number' can be only that which we have abeady 
discerned to be the happiness of man as he is con- 
stituted and conditioned by his Creator. Having 
determined what this happiness is, it then undoubtedly 
becomes our duty to endeavour to distribute it among 
all men, and to devise means for doing so. It is a 
constituent part of the happiness (or rather, condition 
of the happiness) of the moral agent so to do. Analysis 
and psychology, in their rudimentary forms at least, 
thus necessarily precede the action of justice and 
benevolence, and define the aim of the just and bene- 
volent agent. This aim having been once definitely 
fixed, we may do well^ to adopt as the principle or 
test of all social acts and political organization, the 
popular and intelligible phrase, ' The greatest happiness 
of the greatest number ;' in other words, the widest 
possible diffusion of that mental and physical condition 
which analysis has shown to be the highest and best 
for man. 

After what has been said, it will be understood 
that when in the sequel ' the Happiness of Man' is 
called to om: aid as a criterion, it has the signification 
which I have now assigned to it ; — the happiness of 
the norm of man. In treating of Justice, and again 
in the concluding chapter, it wiU be necessary to 
advert to Utilitarianism as commonly held by its 
leading cotemporary advocates. It will also be our 
business, at a future stage, to show that the subordi- 



^ But we may do Letter, as we shall afterwards show iu the chapter on 
'Justice.' 



26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

nation of all action to the supreme end of justice 
is a necessary condition of the happiness of man and 
of individual men. 

We are now in a position, disencumbered of some 
elements of confusion, to return to the question 
already propounded, namely : — 

What is the criterion of the right and wrong in 
acts, with special reference to subjective or intransitive 
acts? 



CHAPTER IV. 

What is the Criterion of the Right and Wrong in Subjective 
or Intransitive Acts 1 

Man is a various and complex being. We have 
already roughly classed his impulses to action, under 
the generally recognised heads of appetitive, etc. 
He is also presumed to be a member of a society, 
because it is only as a social animal that he can find 
occasion for the exercise of his instincts, or come to 
a knowledge of the range of his capacity for desire, 
emotion, or thought. 

The natural history of a fact of consciousness is 
also the analysis of it ; and as we cannot enter upon 
that history without divesting man of his present 
experience and mental envelopment, we must think of 
him in the condition of one groping his Avay in the 
midst of primitive savagedom towards laws of con- 
duct, whereby he may best regulate, while satisfying, 
the conflicting claims of the desires and emotions that 
stir within him, and respond to the demands made on 
him by his external circumstances, physical and social. 

We have already detected the ground of our 
approbation of Transitive acts to be their tendency to 



28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

produce felicity in the object of tliem. Before now 
proceeding to the consideration of the more complex 
question of Intransitive acts and states of will, let us 
revert for a moment to our former argument. We im- 
agined the yet untutored man witness of an act of sjDolia- 
tion; but we found that until through sympathy the 
spectator placed himself in the position of the sufferer 
from whom the axe was abstracted, he was conscious 
of nothing, save the occurrence of an outward incident, 
of which he could make the affirmation, 'that it had 
happened ; ' but which was powerless to excite in him 
any emotion whatsoever ; which was in fact morally 
colourless. Sympathy, however, made him instinc- 
tively participate in the pain of the sufferer, and in his 
displacency. In other words, he felt displacency and dis- 
approbation with the act of abstraction, because of the 
pain which the act inflicted both at the moment and in 
its consequences. If the abstractor had, on the contrary, 
given an axe to a man who wanted one, and who was 
suffering from cold and hunger, because of his need of 
a weapon wherewith to obviate these evils, the com- 
placency which the spectator would then have felt, would 
in like manner have rested on the sympathetic percep- 
tion of the pleasurable effects of the act on the recipient. 
So much for the natural history of the earliest moral 
judgment of transitive acts. When the adjudging spec- 
tator comes to find any of his own acts affecting otliers, 
he transfers to himself the judgment which he has 
passed on another. But this act of borrowed appro- 
bation or disapprobation is not all that happens : in the 



CRITERION OF INTRANSITIVE ACTS. 29 

coct of approving or disapproving his own deed, the 
asfent makes certain moral discoveries which we shall 
evolve in theu^ proper place. 

Let us now advance to the analysis of Intransitive 
acts or states of will, and in doing so, let us again be 
guided by the light of a concrete example. Let us 
suppose that my physical system requires invigora- 
tion : knowing this, I forego my tendency of desire 
for immediate ease ; and leaving a comfortable 
hearth, I face the cold and wind, for five or six 
miles of active exertion; or, when I wake in the 
mornitig, I forego the indulgence of creeping out of a 
warm bed into well-warmed clothes, and dehberately, 
and by free preference, plunge into cold water. These 
acts are doubtless among the humblest of those which 
can claim a moral character ; but we dehberately select 
them, because it is our conviction that, if moral ques- 
tions disdain to walk the streets, the philosophy of 
them must remain in the clouds. Such acts, in 
these latter days at any rate, when viewed in their 
relation to recognised physiological laws, assert for 
themselves a distinct place on the moral platform, and 
fall into the category of right or wrong. In the acts 
cited, I preferred present discomfort for the sake of 
future reward, and I did rightly. Complacency with 
seK followed. By what measm^e is it, that in the sup- 
posed case I thus determine the rightness of that one 
of the two alternative acts which yields a loresent 
pain ? Not certainly through a feehng of complacence 
with the act, as such, apart from its consequences ; for 



30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

this would be to desire pain for its own sake. Nor, 
again, can the perception of the rightness be an inner 
revelation to the intelligence — an instinct of know- 
ledge ; for, as a matter of fact, it is only through the 
consequences of the act that we can predicate any- 
thing whatsoever of its character. Nor, further, is the 
rightness of the d^oX forced upon the consciousness by 
an inner and inscrutable utterance of law or obliga- 
tion, because, as a matter of fact, we know that the 
rightness is not perceived, nor the law accepted as 
imposing the duty of obedience until experience has 
revealed the consequences of such acts. Not in any 
such way is the rightness of the act borne in upon my 
intelligence and presented to my will, but by my 
personal or hereditary experience of the pleasing con- 
sequences of the one act as compared with the other, 
when I take a large view of both. And this is merely 
saying in other words, that I have learned, weighed, 
and measured the two acts, and found the one, by a 
law or habit of my constitution, to surpass the other 
in the Quantity of the feHcity which it yields. The 
judgment of Eightness, in all cases of this kind, thus 
involves a more or less prolonged prior experience. 

Let us suppose next that the alternative is between 
an Appetite and what is called a Sentiment. It will 
not be denied that all the capacities for pleasure in 
man have a legitimate right to natural gratification 
(whatever that may be). This right is based on the 
fact that the desires or capacities exist in him, and that 
they yield pleasure. The only ultimate ground of right 



CEITERION OF INTRANSITIVE ACTS. 31 

to action is the fact of independent existence. This 
neither requires nor admits of proof. It is a moral axiom. 
When, however, a man desires the appetitive pleasure 
(which is in itself goodi and lawful) in circumstances 
which involve the rejection and denial of intellectual 
felicity — of the felicities of the sesthetic, the benefi- 
cent, the just, or the religious sentiments — he does 
wrong, and, concurrently with his act, he becomes 
conscious of displacency with himself. 

Complacency and displacency with self being the 
most patent emotional facts in connexion with human 
acts, we have preferred to make our questions revolve 
round them. We do not thereby mean to maintain 
that these emotions can be referred to a single cause, but 
we are desirous to find the primary ground of these 
emotions when first experienced. For in that primary 
ground we shall be brought face to face with the dis- 
criminating sifter of all acts, — that perception or feeling 
(or whatever else it may be) which tells us that one pur- 
pose or act is right and desirable, and another compet- 
ing purpose or act relatively wrong and undesirable. 

In the region of moral action into which we have 
now travelled the problem becomes more difficult of 
solution, because the question no longer is before us 
in the simple form of promoting a fellow-being's 
pleasure or pain, or of choosing the greater in pre- 
ference to the lesser felicity, but is complicated by a 
new element — the element of Quality. The appetitive 
and the aesthetic feelings (and acts) are supposed to 
conflict. Both unquestionably yield pleasure while 



32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

tliey are being gratified ; botli it is legitimate to 
gratify (subject, as we sliall afterwards see, to tlie 
limitations wbicli the rights of the many desires and 
sentiments of other rational agents by whom we 
are surrounded, impose). But if a man yields, let 
us say, to solitary bibbing, he does so to the denial, 
if not the extinction, of the aesthetic sentiment, not 
to speak of other desires and sentiments ; and so long 
as the power of tranquil self-contemplation remains, 
he necessarily experiences self-displacency. Should he, 
however, treat the appetitive as he has treated the 
aesthetic — ignore such desires, and live a Hfe devoted 
to the beautiful in Nature and Art — he finds this con- 
dition harmonize with all those emotions which we call 
spiritual, and has no sense of displacency with him- 
self for utterly ignoring the appetitive ; or, if he have 
such, it is of a very mild kind. How has he reached 
this self-complacency in acts and states of will, which, 
without extinguishing, yet hourly afiirm supremacy 
over, the clamant assertions of a large portion of 
his nature ? If questioned, he wdll answer that the 
sesthetic is one aspect of the spiritual hfe, the appeti- 
tive of the animal life ; and it is therefore not only 
better, but obligatory, to prefer the former. If w^e 
ask further, ' How did you (presuming, observe, that 
he has not inherited his beliefs and principles, but 
initiates this spiritual life for himself by introspection 
and observation), ascertain the spiritual life to be the 
higher ^^ he will answer: 'From the higher nature 
of the emotions which it raised in me ;' — which is 



INTEANSITIVE ACTS. 33 

manifestly another ^Yay of saying tliat he preferred 
the (so-called) spiritual state of will to the appetitive, 
because it yielded a higher kind or quality of felicity. 
Experience will also very quickly reveal that the 
quantity of felicity which he thereby secures is as 
much greater as its quality is higher, because it is 
durable, and indestructible, and inexhaustible ; but 
the superiority in quality is the chief, as it is the 
"primary, ground of his preference. If we rid our 
minds of the traditionary, social, and religious sanc- 
tions of the ' higher,^ we shall look in vain for any 
other means of discriminating the greater desirableness 
of the ' spiritual' than the higher quality of felicity 
which it yields to beings of our constitution. 

Let us now, having brought within the range of our 
argument and illustration both the quantitative and 
the qualitative element in acts and purposes (transi- 
tive and intransitive), consider for a moment the 
position of those who deny that the test of the right- 
ness of conflicting acts is the felicity they yield, and 
maintain what they conceive to be a more exalted 
theory ; and in doing so let us endeavour to put their 
case in the most favourable way for themselves. 

'With other inquirers,' they say, ' we admit that the 
feeling of self-complacency or approval is a feeling of 
pleasure ; we admit also that man has been so bene- 
ficently constituted by his Creator, that the right act, 
which is followed by a feeling of complacency, also 
yields in itself a felicity, apart from the fact that it is 

c 



34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

approved — a felicity greater in quantity, and higher 
in quahty, than any other possible act yields. But 
we further maintain that the feeling of felicity which 
a rational being's act produces in himself if it be 
intransitive or subjective, in others if it be transitive 
or objective, is not the discriminator of the character 
of rightness in acts, and, therefore, not the ground of 
self-complacency. It is only an accident of the right 
associated with it by our benevolent Creator for the 
purpose of sustaining the weak will of erring human- 
ity. The discriminator of rightness is an antecedent 
something, a mysterious premonition, — a Feeling, we 
may call it, for want of a more distinctive name, 
which instinctively, and luithout a process of reasoning, 
distinguishes the right act or purpose from the wrong. 
The phrase ' Complacence with self ' is certainly a part 
of that which we would denominate the 'moral sense :' 
the moral sense is certainly this. But what we aver 
is, that it is also, and chiefly, an antecedent instinctive 
feeling, quite arbitrary in its character and its modus 
operandi, which by some mysterious law of the human 
constitution, discerns the right from the wrong. The 
moral sense is not only an approbatory and reprobatory 
feeling : it is also, and chiefly, a discriminatory feeling. 
— Now translate this out of the words, 'right' and 
' wrong,' which are words so much worn with use and 
so hampered with secondary meanings, as to admit 
of endless logomachies, and substitute for generalized 
statement a concrete case, and the doctrine stands 
thus in the case of intransitive or subjective acts. 



DISCPJMINATING TESTS. 35 

Pericles, alive to the sentiment of the beautiful, 
prefers the enjoyment which art yields, to thepleasm^es 
of the table, should he be compelled to forego the one 
in order fitly to enjoy the other. Why does he do 
so ? Because on contemplating the two competing 
felicities he instantaneously feels that to indulge the 
sentiment of the beautiful, even though it involves 
the temporary suppression of an appetite, is right, 
while indulgence of the felicity of eating and drinking 
to the denial and suppression of the aesthetic is 
wrong. All physical desires rightfully claim gratifi- 
cation, we have afiirmed, on the plea that they exist.-^ 
Accordingly, though both are in one sense right, the 
competition of the two gratifications — the gratifica- 
tion of a sentiment, and the gratification of an appetite 
— compeUing a choice, the one becomes, in its relation 
to the other, wrong. Now according to the extreme 
moral-sense doctrine it is by means of a mysterious 
Feeling that the right act is in the above case singled 
out. "We shall controvert this doctrine in a separate 
chapter. But here let us say in passing, that inas- 
much as feeling can exist and operate only as in a 
state of pleasure, pain or indifierence, it follows that 
it is the greater or the higher felicity accompanying 
the act said to be right relatively to another (which 
other in the existing circumstances of moral antagon- 
ism is wrong), that enables the intellect to afiirm that 
it is preferable, and thus furnishes the sole primary 
ground of the act of preference. 

^ The proof of this ultimate ground of right may be postponed. 



36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

A similar line of illustration and argument might 
be based on the preference of the religious to the 
aesthetic, when those two sentiments, that is to say, 
acts falling under each respectively, are brought into 
competition. 

Hence, it is here maintained that where alternative, 
Intransitive acts of the same grade or class are pro- 
posed to the will ; for example (to keep to a humble 
illustration already cited), the alternative of indulging 
in warmth or of plunging into cold, the question is 
one which can be decided only after considerable 
experience of both acts, and which is ultimately 
determined by reason in favour of the larger quantity 
of felicity. Again, where the acts proposed belong 
respectively to a higher and lower class or grade, 
the test or measure of the right is the quality 
of the competing felicities. With respect to Transi- 
tive acts — those acts which pass from the agent and 
affect others — let us recal that we found these to be 
right, in so far as they promote that felicity which 
the organization and constitution of Man show to be 
human felicity. The question, in the meantime, is 
not at all as to the grounds of duty (though it neces- 
sarily touches on these), but as to the right act to do 
to self or to others, presuming it to be admitted that 
it is right to do the right act to others — in other 
words, that benevolence and justice are right. What 
we saw in the case of transitive acts was the criterion 
whereby the just and benevolent feelings are to be 
guided in their operation. The rightness of the just 



DISCEIMINATING TESTS. 37 

and benevolent acts, in respect of their justness and 
benevolence as such, is a question of personal or sub- 
jective morality, and is also determined, as we shall 
now proceed to show, like all other moral actions, by 
the criterion of the felicity of Man. 



CHAPTER V. 

Ends and Motives. — The Felicity of Man the end and criterion 
of Transitive as loell as Intransitive Acts. 

In intransitive acts, ends and motives seem at first 
glance identical. An agent's act is directed towards 
an aesthetic or religious felicity as its end in preference 
to an appetitive felicity, bnt the will is moved not by 
that end, but by the conscious desire of that end as 
contemplated and pre-figured. When we regard transi- 
tive acts into which more complicated considerations 
enter, the act which accords with the fehcity of * Man' 
is truly denominated the right act, and is the objective 
end of the act. But the act has also a subjective end, 
namely, the felicity of the agent in the felicity of 
others, or, in other words, the felicity that arises from 
the satisfaction of the sentiment of good-will or 
benevolence. The motive of a transitive act, there- 
fore, relatively to the object or recipient, is the desire 
of his felicity ; relatively to the agent or subject, it is 
desire of felicity in the felicity of another. We would 
here emphasize this distinction. 

The confounding of ends and motives has, it seems 
to me, led writers of both the leadino; schools of 



ENDS AND MOTIVES. 39 

thought, to mix the question of the criterion of acts 
as such with the criterion and conditions of personal 
morality — especially in acts of a transitive kind in 
which the end and the motive, and therefore also the 
criterions, are twofold. We cannot be too vigilant in 
preserving (in the consideration of transitive acts 
above all) the terminal limits of the two questions — 
the criterion of the rightness of the act in relation to 
the moral agent, and the criterion whereby the acts 
themselves in their relation to their object are to be 
measured, and their rightness determined. 

A conscious agent can never find his motive out- 
side himself. In intransitive acts the end and standard 
of the act is (as we have said above) a certain specific 
quality or quantity of felicity, but the motive is the 
desire of that felicity. Both the desire and the end 
being circumscribed by self in this class of acts, and 
not passing beyond the limit of the subject-agent, the 
distinction between motive and end is not always at 
first view obvious. When we pass to transitive acts, 
still less obvious is it that the right act (which we 
have already concluded to be that act wdiich effectuates 
the felicity of its object) has a subjective relation, 
in which relation its rightness quoad the subject or 
agent is determined quite irrespectively of the ultimate 
effect as it comes to maturity in the object. Before 
proceeding further this fact requires to be more 
distinctly evolved. 

Accordingly, if we suppose a man contributing 
for the first time to the felicity of another, what is the 



40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

history of the inner phenomena which accompany or 
follow the act ? First, as we have already shown, he 
has that borrowed feeling of complacence with himself 
which he would feel towards a fellow-man acting in a 
similar way towards himself or some other person. But 
a complacence such as this is not a direct and imme- 
diate, but an indirect and mediate complacence ; it is, 
in fact, merely the reflex action on himself of the com- 
placency with which he may have regarded, or would 
regard, another similarly acting. It is a process of 
ratiocination. Secondly, others, on the same prin- 
ciple, entertain complacency with him ; at least so he 
believes, and he has further felicity in this belief. So 
far this history is true, and the desire of self-compla- 
cence, and of the complacence of others with self, might 
be sufficient motives for any action ; but, putting aside 
the fact that they do not account for the Jlrst act 
ever done in order to produce felicity in another, they 
are neither the only nor the chief motives ; for, thirdly, 
while so acting, the agent makes the discovery that 
the promotion of the felicity of others, whether the 
form which his act assumes be that of Justice or 
Beneficence, yields to himself a felicity distinct in 
kind from the reflex complacence with which he 
beholds himself, or from the complacence of others 
with him (which are in truth merely the natural 
protections of the felicity-producing act) — a felicity, 
namely, in the felicity of others. The natural history 
and analysis of this felicity in the felicity of others, 
or of the so-called sentiments of Justice and Goodwill, 



ENDS AND MOTIVES. 41 

are not our business here : -^ it is sufficient that the 
outward occasions of human life are admitted to call 
these 'sentiments' into consciousness and to give them 
a distinct entity, or quasi-entity, as felicities, and con- 
sequently as in themselves ends of action in the con- 
sciousness of man. Those acts of a man, done with a 
view to promote the felicity of his fellow-men, being- 
done in order to satisfy his felicity in their felicity, and 
the further felicity which arises from the complacence 
of his fellow-men with himself, manifestly have their 
end as well as their motive within himself We would 
insist on this as a distinctive feature of our argument. 
The felicity of others is the end of the act as st/cA, viewed 
objectively and in itself; the felicity of the agent is 
the end, sole measure, and the desire of it is the sole 
motive, of the act in its reference to the agent. Thus, 
relatively to the Moral Agent, the criterion of Transi- 
tive no less than of Intransitive acts is to be found 
in himself, and not at all in felicities existing outside 
himself. In himself, that is to say, as being the only 
representative always accessible to him of the Norm 
of Man. The criterion of the rightness of all acts and 
states of will, then, is to be found within the agent : 
where Quality enters, the criterion is sentiment (in a 
simple or complex form) ; where Quantity enters, it 
is — what shall we say? — the conclusion of the reason 
respecting quantity in the class of cases to which the 
specific act impending may chance to belong. 

1 It will be afterwards our business to show that tlie sentiment of 
Justice is the sentiment of goodwill under special conditions. 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

Were it not so, how would it be possible to com- 
pare the claims of Transitive and Intransitive purposes 
and acts, when the suspended will pauses in contem- 
plation of both while under the necessity of choosing 
one ? We should have (as strict Utilitarians, in point 
of fact, do) to seek in the will of society for the source 
of obligation. The felicity of others, although it can 
be sympathetically apprehended, stands outside and 
away from the agent, and supplies no ground of com- 
parison with other felicities and motives of action, 
save in so far as it is also the felicity of the agent 
himself. It is this link of connexion which enables 
the Intelligence to contrast alternatives of action when 
the conflict lies between the Transitive and Intransi- 
tive ends and motives, in the same way as it deter- 
mines the conflicting claims of purely Subjective or 
Intransitive acts and states of will one with the 
other. It seeks, in short, to determine their quality 
or quantity, or both, relatively to each other. 

I^et us apply the above reasoning to the compari- 
son of the Transitive and Intransitive ends of action 
when opposed to each other, avoiding, as in former 
cases, the snares of abstract language by resting on a 
concrete example. 

A man in pursuit of food catches a kid. Eeturn- 
ing with it to his village of mud or caves, he meets 
with one of the same tribe hungry and too feeble to 
hunt for himself. To reserve the whole animal for his 
own use will, he feels, yield him much direct enjoy- 



ENDS AND MOTIVES. 43 

ment, besides allowing him that undisturbed ease on 
the following day, which, to the savage or semi-savage 
nature, seems to be a more intense enjoyment than to 
civilized man. The alternative here is between a very 
solid personal felicity and the felicity of another. Let 
us suppose that he prefers the latter. Why does he 
do so ? The lowest rendering of the half- conscious 
process which ends in his sharing the kid, is that 
sympathy enables him to realize, as if it were his 
own, the pain of his fellow and the pleasure which a 
third party, appearing on the scene and sharing his 
spoil with him (the agent) would (were he in the same 
circumstances) give him ; and, further, the pleasure it 
would give him in the third party so acting. Now, this 
is simply to say, in a circumlocutory way, that he shared 
the kid, because he preferred the pleasure of another, 
and that other's pleasure with him his benefactor, to the 
gratification of his own physical desires ; or, in other 
words, he preferred the inner felicity of Beneficence, 
followed up by the complacence or approbation of his 
fellow-man with him because of his having preferred 
this to certain other felicities of an unquestionable 
and substantial, yet lower and lesser kind. What, 
then, has been his guide to a decision while medi- 
tating the alternatives ? What has he been doing ? 
Manifestly comparing felicities ; and the contempla- 
tion of the higher Quality and greater Quantity of 
one class of felicities as contrasted with the other has 
stirred in him the desire of moral possession, and so 
set his will in motion in the ' Right' direction. * Eight' 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

relatively to himself (that is, preferable) he found it 
to be solely through the higher and greater felicities 
which it yielded ; and in no other way was it possible 
for him, as an autonomous and as yet uninstructed 
moral agent, primarily to discern its Kightness rela- 
tively to himself 

To repeat in concluding : Transitive acts — that is 
to say, benevolent acts and just acts — have a twofold 
end, according as we regard the object or the subject 
of the act, and consequently, also, a twofold motive. 
And, as in the previous chapter we detected the ob- 
jective end of such acts, when right, to be Felicity, so 
now again we have found the subjective end — the 
notes which discriminate the rightness of promoting 
the felicity of others in preference to the securing of 
certain other personal felicities — to be Felicity. The 
feeling or perception of higher or greater felicity dis- 
criminates the rightness, relatively to the agent, of 
Transitive (Beneficent or Just) acts as compared with 
certain other Intransitive acts when they conflict ; 
while, again, the perception of that which, psychologi- 
cally speaking, constitutes human felicity, discriminates 
the direction which the well-meaning Transitive act is 
to take in order to secure its beneficent end. 

At this stage of our inquiry, as at the conclusion 
of the previous chapter, we shall dou1)tless again be 
met by those who cling tenaciously to a 'm.oral sense' 
which they maintain, operates on the will from a 
vantage-ground high above that occupied by vulgar 



PEO VISIONAL SUMMARY. 45 

felicity. But this position now requires a separate 
chapter for its consideration. 

Before proceeding further, however, let it be 
observed that if our inquiry has, so far as it has gone, 
rejected a ^conscience' or 'moral sense,' in the signifi- 
cation in which the existence and operation of that 
faculty seem to be maintained, it is also sufficiently 
evident that our results do not accord with Utili- 
tarianism in its only logical form. That this may 
be apparent, let our present conclusions be here con- 
cisely summarized : 

(1.) There are many and divers felicities possible 
for man. 

(2.) These felicities vary essentially in their 
Quahty as well as in their Quantity. 

(3.) The discernment of the higher and lower 
quality of felicities is ultimately and inexplicably 
determined hj feeling (self-consciousness making it 
possible for a rational being to compare two or more 
feelings and felicities). Or, in other words, there is 
in man an instinctive sentient discrimination of the 
Quality of felicities. 

(4.) Inasmuch as Man is a * being of large dis- 
course, looking before and after,' there is also an in- 
tellectual capacity for measuring their Quantity. 

(5.) The criterion of rightness or approvableness 
in acts and states of will, transitive and intransitive, 
is their tendency to promote the felicity of Man as he 
is constituted and conditioned : and, where two or 
more ends and motives conflict, that end and motive 



46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

is the right (and therefore, as we shall afterwards show, 
the obligatory), which is characterized by the higher 
or greater felicity, or both. 

(6.) Transitive acts have a twofold end, and there- 
fore a twofold criterion, — the felicity of the object 
or objects of the act, and the felicity of the subject 
acting ; consequently, a twofold motive — a motive 
being the conscious desire of an end. 

(7.) The attainment of the former end — the fe- 
licity of others — determines the direction which the 
just or beneficent act is to take, and, consequently, the 
rightness of the act objectively considered ; while the 
attainment of the latter end — the felicity of the sub- 
ject — determines the rightness of the benevolent and 
just acting compared with any other possible acting 
— rightness we say, for with that alone are we in the 
meantime concerned. We have yet to consider 
wherein lies the morality of an act, as distinguished 
from its mere rightness. 



CHAPTER VL 

Controversion of the Doctrine that the Right is dis- 
criminated hy an arbitrary, inner Sense. 

While admitting complacence and displacence, in 
the form of approbation, to Le a constituent part of 
what we call ^ conscience' (say the Intuitive school), 
the conscience or moral sense, also, and chiefly, vindi- 
cates its existence as a discerning and dividing faculty 
— as a discriminator among acts. It is the criterion 
or standard of acts, as well as the approver of them. 
The felicity which characterizes the right as an ac- 
companiment of it has no essential connexion with 
the discovery and discernment of the right, though it 
is invariably coincident with it. 

Now, a moral sense, discriminating the right act 
among many possible acts or states of will, must, we 
suppose, mean an instinctive and instantaneous feel- 
ing of rightness seen to reside in an act and to con- 
stitute an inherent quality of it. Now observe, in the 
first place, that we have already disposed of a moral 
judgment as an illusory faculty. The moral sense, if 
it exists anywhere, is to be found (as we have seen) 
located between two acts of the understanding ; but 
to call it a judgment, or by any other equivalent 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

name, is to make it an act of pure intellect, which 
would be suicidal. What is therefore meant is, that 
there is in man an inscrutable feeling in presence of 
any proposed act, which, in an inexplicable way, so 
operates on the intellect as to coerce it into the affir- 
mation of the rightness, approvableness, and obliga- 
toriness of that act. (For * conscience,' as commonly 
treated, does all three ; and the three acts are hope- 
lessly mixed together in intuitional speculation.) 

But this mysterious impulse of feeling must 
manifest itself in some form. Is it a sense of the 
harmony of the proposed act with our nature ? This 
cannot be meant ; for this would be merely another 
way of affirming that it is complacence of self with 
the act as such ; and this again would mean, and 
could only mean, a feeling of felicity in contemplating 
the act. 

Shifting his ground, the moral-sense theorist may 
say : ' Although I admit that the greater quantity or 
higher quality of felicity invariably accompanies that 
act of two or more possible acts which excites com- 
placence, yet I detect in myself an impulse or feeling, 
or what you will, of law and imperativeness inciting 
and commanding me to a specific act as right, and 
forcing me to stigmatize another and opposed act 
as wrong. Thus it is — through this sense of law 
or authoritativeness — that I discriminate the right 
from the wrong, and hnoio my duty.' ^ I cannot,' he 
may continue, ' in the face of past history, present 
well-attested facts ; and the growth of " conscience" in 



CONTEOVERSION. 49 

children affirms the crude and vulgar opinion, that 
among ^particular conflicting acts the sense of law, to 
which I have referred, steps majestically forth out of 
the unknown into my consciousness, and attaches 
itself to some specific act or purpose, thereby marking 
it out as right ; but I maintain that as soon as the 
intellect has done its share of the work on the moral 
material before it, and has connected the acts possible 
for me in any given case with their proper sentiment 
or desire or principle, in my mind, the process of 
comparing the sentiments and desires claiming through 
these various possible acts to govern my will, is 
abruptly cut short by an arbitrary inner emotional 
movement ; and I cannot explain this movement 
otherwise than as an inarticulate utterance of law 
which instantaneously elicits in me a correlative feel- 
ing of Obligation/ 

That this feeling of Law exists, and that, in the 
case of all educated consciences, it is intimately blended 
mth the right act, is unquestionable. It is the most 
important fact in our moral economy. Far be it from 
us to handle heedlessly this awful inner fact : it is 
sacred, but not so sacrosanct as to make it impious to 
penetrate the veil behind which it is enshrined. Its 
nature and function will be considered in its proper 
place ; our attention is called to it here solely because it 
is dragged by others out of its proper place, and consti- 
tuted the discriminator, and therefore, the criterion of 
rightness in acts. Those who affirm this doctrine, do 
not necessarily deny that there is in man a sentient dis- 

D 



50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

crimination of the quality, and an intellectual discern- 
ment of the quantity of the felicity arising out of 
certain acts, but only that the higher or greater felicity 
so discriminated or discerned, furnishes the standard 
of right, and points the way to the suspended will. 
On the contrary, irrespectively of and in addition to 
such discrimination or discernment of felicity, it is 
affirmed that an inexplicable emotional impulse au- 
thoritatively affirms Tightness as a quality of a par- 
ticular act or state of will, relatively to other alterna- 
tive acts or states of will. 

This sense of law attaching itself to certain senti- 
ments, acts, or motives, in preference to others, must 
itself be either analysable or ultimate. If it be the 
former, the ' conscience doctrine,' to which we have 
above endeavoured to give adequate expression, must 
seek for a new form of words in accordance with the 
ultimate form in which analysis may present to us the 
feeling or sentiment of law. We need not concern 
ourselves with this here, because our future con- 
sideration of the sentiment of law will satisfy us that 
if it be analysable, the above doctrine is untenable ; 
and further, because the ' conscience ' school cannot 
consistently or safely depart from their belief in the 
ultimateness of the sentiment, which accordingly we 
may for the time assume. The redargument of the 
doctrine of the ' conscience ' school, as it is commonly 
held, we would evolve as follows : — 

I. The admitted invariable association of the 
highest or greatest felicity with the sentiment or act 



CONTROVERSION. 51 

which the ultimate authoritative law is affirmed to 
reveal to us to be the right, is a presumption that the 
perception of the felicity at least influences, if it do 
not govern, the discrimination and determination of 
rightness. 

II. If the sentiment of law ascertains and deter- 
mines the right, it must do so in the case of each 
particular act, or of the sentiment or desire or prin- 
ciple under which the act is, after inquiry, found to fall. 
The former mode of operation, though it is apparently 
maintained by some, does not admit of rational 
defence, except in the hands of those who, confound- 
ing the vulgar ' conscience ' with the philosophical 
'moral sense,' argue from the phenomena of the 
former, under the delusion that it is the latter. The 
facts of moral growth in children would settle all such 
questions, were not some spectators too loftily engaged 
to see what is beneath the level of their exalted 
vision. The history of our race, and the recorded 
facts of contemporaneous savagedom, would support 
and confirm the lessons which children teach us. 

But, leaving general language, let us re-enter the 
region of detail, and see what actually happens when 
an act is presented to the law-giving conscience for 
judgment. Divest the mind of the much-worn gar- 
ments of an hereditary conscience, and conceive the 
case of the axe-abstractor, which has already served us 
in good stead. The intellect of the spectator can affirm 
what his eyes see, namely, that the axe is taken away. 
But here it stops. Until, through sympathy, the spec- 



52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

tat or realizes the ]}ain of the sufferer, he cannot by 
possibility have any emotion whatsoever, or any moral 
impulse, or any judgment save the affirmation of the 
perceived matter of fact. What is this, but to say 
that the wrongness of the act is determined by the 
"pain which it inflicts, — is, in other words, discriminated 
and ascertained through .the infelicity oiit; the right- 
ness of an act being conversely ascertained through 
the felicity of it ? If this be denied, it must at least 
be admitted, that in such a case as that supposed, no 
inner law -giving affirmation of rightness or wrongness 
is possible vntil the pain is sympathetically felt, and 
that the pain accordingly, even if it be nothing more, 
is at least a pre-condition of the authoritative silent 
utterance of rightness and wrongness. 

Again, let us recur to the struggle between appeti- 
tive desires and benevolent feeling in the case of the 
hunter who divided the kid. He doubted between the 
act of holding and the act of giving ; how could he 
even doubt prior to sympathy ? His business was to 
keep the kid. Accordingly it would appear, that here 
again there is, and can be, no case even p7^65672^gcZ 
to the presumed authoritative instinct of law for its 
decision, until the pain of the hungry man is sympa- 
thetically felt ; until his felicity in receiving, and the 
agent's felicity in that felicity are set over-against the 
appetitive felicities which are involved in keeping the 
kid. A lore-condition then of the presumed inner 
utterance of law with respect to the character of 
Transitive acts, is experience of the felicities proper to 



CONTROVERSION. 53 

these acts ; which is to say, that kw folloivs in the 
path which the higher felicity takes. And this is to 
say, that the inner utterance of law comes upon the 
stage as a discriminator, after its work is already 
done 1 

The same is true of Intransitive rightnesses, as 
will be readily seen, if the illustrations formerly given 
under this head be reverted to. If this inner utter- 
ance, then, comes into consciousness in the wake of a 
discrimination by felicity, is it not reasonable to con- 
clude, according to the law of parcimony, that its 
function is not detective or discriminative at all ? 

If this mode of ascertaining the right be true, in 
the case of competing qualities of cliflferent classes of 
felicity, a fortiori is it true in the case of competing 
quantities of the same class of felicity. Take the 
example already given in the class of physical felici- 
ties. I prefer, when I awake, the immediate pain of a 
cold bath, to the unquestionable felicity of a blazing 
fire and warmed clothing. My system requires bracing, 
and, in choosing the bath, I do the right act, and it is 
right solely because the mass of physical felicity or 
comfort which it will ultimately yield wiU surpass 
the more immediate, but fleeting and delusive, felicity 
with which it competes. It may be urged, that there 
is more than this ; that my act is right, because it is 
in accordance with the physiological law of health, 
which again is a law of God, and by implication. His 
command. But how is this law itself ascertained ? 
Only by tracing, by means of those painful or plea- 



54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

surable consequences on the human frame which we 
call health and disease, certain physiological causes 
and effects. 

III. We have shown that there is a moral sense 
in the form of an instinctive sentient discrimination 
of the higher and lower qualities of felicities ; and this 
will be generally admitted by the Intuitive School. 
But this instinctive discrimination becomes useless in 
the moral economy of the human mind, if the myste- 
rious and authoritative dictum of law determines the 
rightness of an act. To presume that it exists for the 
purpose of supporting the weak and hesitating will, 
just as we employ sugar-plums to strengthen the 
resolution of children, is a cynical supposition scarcely 
credible. 

lY. To substitute inexpHcable law for fehcity as 
a test of the right is to deprive right acts of all char- 
acter, and to place the source of morahty in the 
arbitrary and unintelligible. The right act or state 
of will becomes the ordered act or state of will, and 
this is to say that ' the right' has no essential charac- 
teristic at aU, but is only associated with the fact 
'that it is commanded' — a fact external to itself. By 
being arbitrary it is at once destitute of character 
and of intehigibility. 

V. If an ultimate inner force called law (or by 
any other name) compels the intellect to the discern- 
ment of the right, it must either be maintained that 
it does so from the first in the case of individual acts 
(not merely of sentiments and principles of action). 



COXTROYERSION. 55 

and thus morality could have no history, which is 
absurd : Or, if in order to meet the hard facts of 
experience and history, it be maintained that law (or 
by whatever name it is called) projects itself into 
consciousness only in connexion with sentiments or 
principles of action, and that the moral history of the 
individual and the race is the intellectual discovery of 
the governing sentiments to which the infinite variety 
of acts in their turn appeals, do we not then stultify 
the inner law ? For, is it not presumed to be in its 
very essence omniscient as well as omnipotent ? shall w^e 
degrade it to the position of an attendant on the slow 
operations of the intellect ? "\Ye first claim for it the 
high position of being the all in all, the beginning and 
the end of morality, and then we make it superfluous 
— superfluous that is to say as the original discrimi- 
nator and test of the right. 

VI. An inner law is a formal state of mind. A 
law is a law, and as it contains in itself nothing save 
a bare formal utterance, it must be equally strong 
at all times, in all places, and in every class of act. 
That there is a law (for example) requiring attention 
to certain conditions of health, and that this law is 
Divine and now a constituent part of civilized morality, 
will not be denied. But this law is not so strong and 
coercive in its relation to my will as the law which is 
associated with justice, beneficence, and religion. Why 
is it not so ? If law be the sole discriminator of the 
right in acts, it ought to be equally strong in all cases, 
for a law" is a law wherever we find it, and as such it 



56 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

cannot vary in its imperativeness. Some other element 
manifestly enters into tlie varions acts and states of 
will possible for man, and gives them their relative 
importance in the scale of morality ; and what can this 
be but the only other element which presents itself 
as a possible discriminator or test of acts — namely, 
felicity, qualitative and quantitative 1 But if felicity 
determines the relative intensity and iveight of moral 
laws, does it not also point the way for the sense 
of law, indicating that act or sentiment or principle 
among two or more to which it is to affix itself ? 

VII. Finally, to repeat what I found it neces- 
sary to anticipate in a former chapter, all desires 
and sentiments are, in their j)^cice, right when they 
take shape in purpose or in act. Morality begins 
when two or more conflict. The inner something 
which arbitrarily elects that particular desire or senti- 
ment which is entitled to govern the will — which is 
right, — if it be not law, must be feeling, — a feeling 
mysterious, inscrutable and strange, but yet sl feeling. 
Now it is manifest that feeling must be affected in 
some way if it is to indicate preference of some one 
pMrticular act over two or more. But feeling can be 
affected only pleasurably or painfully. If the election 
of the act felt to be right arises from the fact that it 
affects the mysterious and inscrutable feeling more 
pleasurably than the others, we are unexpectedly 
brought round to the doctrine of felicity as a discrimi- 
nating test. To make tlie circuit was superfluous. 

The conclusion of all which is, that it is impossible 



CONTROVERSION. 5 7 

to detect in the so-called ' conscience' or 'moral sense' 
any elements save these — (l.) A feeling of compla- 
cence and displacence. (2.) An instinctive sentient 
discrimination of Quality in felicities, and through 
this in the acts of which the felicities are the end. 
(3.) A rational conception of Quantity in felicities. 
(4.) A sense of law, imperativeness or obligation, and 
their co-relatives — obedience and duty — attached to 
the perception of rightness, but not inherent in it. 
This Sense or Sentiment of Law will form the subject 
of a future chapter, in which its nature and history 
will be analysed. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Distinction between the Rightness of the Act, and the Mor- 
ality or Goodness of the Agent ; the tuords ' approvahle' 
' right! ' wrong ^ etc. 

Cmnque omnis controversia aut de re soleat aiit de nomine 
esse ; utraqne earum nascitur si aut res ignoratur aut erratur in 
nomine. — Cic. De Fin. iv. 21. 

Men are more concerned with the rio^htness of acts 
than with the morality or goodness of agents. 

We have seen that even transitive acts — those 
acts the objective criterion of which is the felicity of 
others — have associated with them subjective felicities 
and infelicities in the consciousness of the agent, and 
that, in deliberating between various possible acts, the 
agent is led to a judgment by discriminating between 
the quality and quantity of the subjective felicities 
which the various acts respectively yield. In choosing 
the right — that is, the higher and greater felicity, — 
he encounters both complacence with self and the 
complacence of others. He is self-approved, and 
approved by his fellow-men. He has not, even in 
such transitive acts, to go out of himself in order to 
determine the character of his acts : the criterion, as 



VERBAL CONFUSIONS. 59 

well as the end of rightness, is within himself. Eela- 
tively to himself as a moral agent, the character of his 
acts is determined before the will reaches the com- 
pletion of its movement in the external act. The 
end, and consequently the motive-desires, elected by 
him to the control of his will, determines the rio^ht- 
ness of the ao'ent. 

But it does not follow from this that the agent, in 
acting approvably, acts, either in the case of intransi- 
tive or transitive felicities, in such a way as to secure 
for himself or for others the felicity which is the end 
of his right motive and appro vable volition. The 
proper direction of the volition towards the attain- 
ment of the contemplated end is a matter dependent 
on the range and acuteness of the agent's mental 
vision, and the adequacy of his mental estimate 
of those things which pass within his range. Both 
are always and inevitably more or less imperfect 
— may he so imperfect as to make the well-purposed 
volition mistaken, nay, disastrous, in its effects. The 
shortness of human vision prevents our seeing the real 
character of the act as such (that is, objectively 
considered) by precluding the possibility of our 
accompanying it into all its ultimate and collateral 
effects on the true felicity of those whom it may 
touch, or of ourselves. Nor could any other doctrine 
be admissible in the field of practical morality. The 
complacency of the individual with himself, and of 
others with him — his life-happiness — could not rea- 
sonably be made dependent on the collateral and 



60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

ultimate bearings of an act, which even the most 
assiduous investigation may fail to detect. It is, in 
truth, this dependence of the rightness of an act on 
the intellectual perception of the constitution of man, 
and of the final effects of the act on that constitution, 
that gives morality a history. Without this it would 
have no history, but spring, fully armed, into life, 
like Minerva from the head of Jove. The laudable 
motive-desire is one thing, the concurrence of the 
near and remote incidence of the act with the motive- 
desire is a matter for the ever-erring intellect to 
determine, — nay, a matter which, in the earlier stages 
of society, the most powerful intellects would neces- 
sarily fail to determine. Acts have a substantive 
vitality of their own, and a history which takes time 
in which to evolve itself; and of no act can it be 
said that it is right or wrong until it is dead. 

It behoves us, accordingly, to avoid the applica- 
tion of the words 'moral' and 'immoral' to acts (since 
these can be neither one nor the other), and of the 
words ' right' and ' wrong' to moral agents. The act, 
whether we regard its near end and criterion (that 
which absolves the responsible agent) which is senti- 
ment or the conclusions of reason, or its ulterior 
criterion in the effected happiness of man, is 'right' or 
it is ' wrong.' The moral agent is appro vable, good, 
virtuous, on the ground of considerations quite apart 
from the rightness of his act, either in its purpose or 
its end. The next chapter will show what these con- 
siderations are. It is of vital moment, to a clear 



VEPvBAL CONFUSIONS. 61 

apprehension of the questions at issue, to observe this 
distinction as applicable to all acts — the intransitive 
as well as the transitive : nay, further, it is important 
to note that the emotive desire of an agent in a 
specific direction — for example, the satisfaction of the 
sentiment of benevolence in himself rather than of 
what are accurately called ' lower ^ principles of action 
— is right or wrong, but is not in any accurate sense 
^good,' ^virtuous/ Again, the word ' approvable' may 
be applied to acts as such, as well as to agents, but it 
is so applied on different grounds in each case : this we 
shall see in the next chapter, where we analyse the 
grounds of our approbation of the agent. The verbal 
confusion, incidental in a peculiar degree to ethical 
inquiries because of the wear and tear to which 
ethical language is subjected in ordinary life, is 
exemplified in no words more fully than in those now 
referred to. 

The word ' Moral ' is indifferently used to mean 
(l.) that class of phenomena which has to do with 
human conduct generally. (2.) That class of motive- 
desires which is good or approvable, because they pro- 
pose an end which is 'right.^ (3.) That class of acts, 
which, as acts or accomplished ends, are right. (4.) 
Agents virtuously energizing. We must bear in mind 
these various uses, and not be misled by the unsteadi- 
ness of their application ; nor must we ourselves, if we 
can help it, set an example of negligence in employing 
them. 

The word ' right,' again — and this is a much more 



62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

serious matter — is constantly used as if it contained 
some of that peculiar moral or emotional element 
whicli is to be found in the notion of complacence or 
approbation with moral agents as energizing rightly. 
It has to do solely with acts qua acts in their rela- 
tion to criteria and ends. 

Hence we find a lending and borrowing of powers 
between the words 'good' and 'moral/ on the one 
hand, and ' right' on the other. ' Moral/ ' good/ and 
their opposites have an emotional element in them, 
and are properly applied to agents as such, and to 
states of will in their relation to the conditions of 
right acting — (See Chap, viii.) 'Eight' and 'Wrong' 
are properly reserved for motive-desires, and for acts 
as such, contemplated as these may be (both logi- 
cally and really) in relation to their ends and criteria 
(subjective or objective), and apart from the pro- 
ducing agency. ' Eight' strictly means, 'in accordance 
with some standard outside the will,' and is appHcable 
to acts alone, or the movement of desire towards an 
end considered in itself. 'Approvable' and 'censur- 
able,' again, are applied (and correctly applied) indiffer- 
ently to motive-desires, ends, acts, and agents. We 
have only to bear in mind that in approving the 
motive-desires, ends, or acts, as such, we do so because 
of their conformity to the standard of action — their 
lightness ; while, in approving agents, we do so apart 
from the rightness of their willing and acting, but 
solely with reference to the conditions of their willing 
as they do. These distinctions are more fully evolved 
in the next Chapter. 



CHAPTER yill. 

The Sanctions of the Right. The real nature of Moral 
Energizing. Essential Antagonism of Right and Wrong. 
Self Will, Virtue, Merit. Syra'pathy and A'p'pro'bation of 
Men. Communion loith, and Approhation hy, God. Sense 
of Law, Duty, and OUigation. 

Mortals who would follow me, 
Love Virtue : she alone i&free. 

Milton's Comm. 

' Is it then the case (it may be fairly urged), that a 
man in doing the " right " has his act fully accounted 
for, by saying that he has chosen the highest or 
greatest felicity within his reach ? And, when he does 
the " wrong,'' does this merely mean, that in the exer- 
cise of a free choice, he has preferred a lower or lesser 
felicity ? If so, wherein rests, or can rest, the ground 
of praise or blame in any moral sense in which those 
terms can be applied ? or where shall we look for the 
source of obligation and imperativeness ^ It is true, 
that if his preference of the lower felicity should 
happen to cause the infelicity of others, we, as fel- 
low-members of the same society and interested in his 
acts, may fairly blame him for something more than 
either an intellectual blunder or levity of choice. But 
the displacence which his act stirs, is " moral,'' only in a 



64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

very rudimentary sense; in truth, it is a feeling shared 
with men by animals, with this addition in us, that we 
can feel for others as well as for ourselves, and can affirm 
our feelings. The agent's judgment of himself again, 
in so doing the wrong transitive act, is no more than a 
reflection of the displacence of others, while his compla- 
cence or displacence with self in the whole class of sub- 
jective acts and states of will which substantially make 
up his life, is wholly unaccounted for. Does not such 
a rendering of the moral consciousness subvert morality 
in the ordinary acceptation, and substitute some other 
thing in its place ? Uuder such a scheme of morals, is 
it not manifestly absurd to call a man vicious, bad, or 
in any way to load him with either laudation or 
censure 1 He commits a mm^ler. Why then, he is 
certainly a fool not to know that to have withheld 
his hand would have been more for his comfort. We 
hang him, it is true, but we do so, merely because such 
folly is apt to interfere very materially with the 
general felicity if not promptly checked. This surely 
is manifestly a very partial account of the phenomena 
of moral consciousness.' 

The above objections are a fair enough specimen of 
the confounding of things different to be met with in 
ethical inquiries. It is evident that the criterion of 
morality cannot furnish us with a history of moral 
movement in the agent, nor exhaust the sanctions of 
the right which are involved in the mental consti- 
tution of man. These are quite distinct questions. 

Starting from the feelings of complacency or dis- 



SANCTIONS OF THE RIGHT. 65 

placency with acts, we have up to this point been 
considering the ground of those feelings, in the 
expectation of separating from a very complex state 
of consciousness, that quality, the detection of which 
in an act, primarily stirs those feelings ; in other 
words, we have been seeking the ultimate (not the 
proximate) standard or measure of Eightness or Wrong- 
ness in acts. In doing this, we have contemplated 
the phenomena of moral consciousness objectively or 
anthropologically, and apart from the fact of will. 
In searching for the criterion, it was convenient thus 
to begin our search with a postulated emotion in the 
moral agent, but the whole object of the inquiry was 
the discovery of the aim and purpose of acts qua acts. 
We have still to seek and find the ground of com- 
placency and displacency with the agent acting, 
willing, energizing. 

The rudimentary feehng of displacency with the 
agent who is seen to inflict pain on others, is merely 
an animal feeling 2^^us sympathy and understanding. 
The agent and his act are seen together, and judged 
as one ; the judgment being properly a moral one, 
only in a rudimentary sense. Self-consciousness en- 
ables us quickly to advance beyond this primitive 
position : we soon attain to a capacity and a title to 
entertain feelings of complacency towards moral 
agents as such by experience of the grounds of those 
feehngs of complacency and displacency in ourselves 
towards ourselves, when we ourselves act rightly or 
wrongly. The inner history of moral emotion that 

E 



66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

transacts itself in us, we transfer to others, and pro- 
nounce judgment accordingly. That inner history, 
if watched, brings us face to face with the greatest 
mystery of man's nature — the fact of duality — and 
leads us into those secret recesses, where sit enshrined, 
God and Free-will. 

I shall here avoid as much as possible, what I 
believe to be the ultimate form of expression 
which a thorough analysis of the great fact of man s 
duality would require, and keep (for the present) within 
the limits of the ordinary language of ethical writers. 

In this language, then, we call upon the reader to 
realize the familiar phenomena of his emotional nature, 
and to pause with attention before the contradictions 
which it presents. First, he beholds that array of 
desires and sentiments, which we have already viewed 
in the preceding chapters, in their gradation of 
ascending and descending quality. In the midst of 
these stands his self or personality, which makes its 
presence known in the form of Will. Desires and 
sentiments seem to pour into his self-consciousness in 
a continuous, capricious, and unregulated stream. 
He seems to be part of the mechanism of nature. 
This current of non-conscious movement it is his pre- 
rogative, as man, to arrest, l^efore it passes into action. 
The fact that they exist constitutes the right of the 
various desires and sentiments to live, and they 
accordingly pass on unquestioned, unless discerned 
by the will, which now assumes the form of knowledge, 
to conflict with no other rights when asserting their 



SANCTIONS OF THE RIGHT. 6 7 

own. If any desire, in its haste to secure the peculiar 
felicity which belongs to it, seek to ignore the 
rights of another desire, the satisfaction of the former 
would be wrong. Into the midst of the tumultuous 
democracy of human emotion advances the sovereign 
will, and marks the limits of each and every force. 
But observe, that until one activity conflicts with 
another, there is no moral element in the ever-chang- 
ing emotions that traverse the consciousness of man. 
It is the existence of a conflict between two (or more) 
motive -desires which calls for the intervention of the 
Arbiter, self or will. This Arbiter entertains the con- 
flicting elements in thought, and elects that motive- 
desire which has been ascertained to yield the greater 
quantity or higher quality of felicity to man. 

Now, here we must state two facts,— ^r^^, that 
when contemplating the capacities and activities of 
man, psychologically and objectively, with reference 
to a criterion of acts and states of will, the words 
^higher and 'lower quality, or 'greater quantity, by 
which alone we could distinguish one from the other, 
now become inadequate. It is no longer a question 
between a lower felicity and a higher, but between 
felicities so related in our moral consciousness that 
they mutually deny each other. The hunter who 
retains the whole kid, and prefers his own physical 
satisfaction to the satisfaction of a suffering fellow- 
creature, and to the felicity which the satisfaction of 
the latter yields to him, does, in truth, by choosing 
the former, give the lie to his higher nature. In the 



58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

relations in which the conflicting desires and sentiments 
then stood, he had to choose, not between a 'higher' 
and ' lower/ a 'better' and a 'worse/ but between a high 
and a low, a good and a bad. The multiform sug- 
gestions of desires, appetitive or sentimental, are, each 
in its own place, legitimate, and productive of felicity ; 
and in fixing the criterion of the right, we have been 
compelled to treat of them all as felicities, and to dis- 
tinguish them according to their quantity and quality : 
but in their relations to the responsible agent now 
called on to act, they, as a matter of fact, mutually 
exclude each other ; and therefore, to give free action 
to the one is to contradict and suppress the other. 
Thus, then, it appears that the moral agent who 
chooses the lower of two conflicting felicities does not 
merely erringly choose the ' lower' in the exercise of a 
natural right because so it pleases him to do, but 
deliberately negatives and abjures the higher. He 
affirms that the high is not, he affirms that the low 
is : he sets aside the right and does the wrong. The 
duality of man thus reveals a permanent and irrecon- 
cilable antagonism between the acts and states of 
will at any moment possible for him.. It is to this 
antagonism that the Stoics must have pointed, and 
to which Cicero gives inadequate expression. The 
wrongdoer accordingly not only ignores and foregoes a 
higher felicity : he affirms that that higher felicity 
does not exist ; and he carries with him into the wrong 
'Mtt, and l^eyond it, the memory of that denial, the 
consciousness that he has l^elied his higher nature 



SANCTIONS OF THE RIGHT. 69 

and been untrue to himself, and, we might say, to 
Nature in Zeno's sense. Inner discord, the pain of 
moral dislocation, takes possession of his consciousness. 

Not only so ; for, secondly, 

A consideration of the duality of man reveals 
the further fact that the current of non-conscious sen- 
sation and volition is strong and heady, and that 
where there is a conflict of emotions, those which it is 
easy to gratify are precisely those which are wrong, 
and that the preference of the right accordingly 
involves a powerful effort of resistance, and a strong 
act of self-conscious will. That this discord between 
the high and the low should exist is the most remark- 
able fact in the human economy — the easy descent, 
the difficult ascent — the rugged road of virtue, the 
smooth and delectable path of vice. Not only is the 
free choice of the right a successful effort of man's 
personality, in order to assert for himself and God the 
domination of some principle of action : it is also the 
voluntary incurring of pain for the sake of the high 
and counterbalancing felicity. The lower felicity 
(appetitive or other) is suppressed with suffering, and 
is the penal sacrifice over which man advances to the 
full assumption of his manhood — to virtue. 

In these remarks Virtue is implicitly defined, 
and Merit in the human agent is assigned its proper 
significance. The sensational or non-conscious current 
of man's life naturally runs in the direction of the 
lower felicities. Self-consciousness, as Will, — which 



70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

is to say, Man— exerts its opposing might with vary- 
ing success. When the stream of sensation or emotion 
sweeps away the barrier of the will, man himself, as 
man, is overthrown. The wrong-doer, if he is a self 
conscious being, consequently endures the pain of 
degradation. Thus, not only is the higher felicity by 
him ignored, the higher nature abjured, and inner 
discord established in the deepest recesses of his 
nature, but the consciousness of a free-choosing self is 
overturned, and manhood for the time is lost. On 
the other hand, where will asserts its imperial power 
and arrests, in order to overpower or guide the current 
of sensation, self or manhood is vindicated. This 
mental condition is aptly named virtuous, a word 
which, etymologically, goes far into the metaphysics 
of personal morality, reaching down to its very root. 
Virtue alone is free, and she is the mother of all the 
virtues. Virtue too, under our definition, becomes an 
end in itself— not merely as the illusory deification of 
means to an ulterior end.^ 

Thirdly, Man is so constituted that his social and 
sympathetic sensibilities are governing elements in 
his life. Nay, it would not be difiicult, though it 
might be irrelevant, to show that before he can attain 
a sense of his individual and personal manhood in the 
crudest form, his social sympathies and sensibilities 
must have come into play. Be that as it may, it is 
certain that these sensibilities bind him to his fellow- 

^ See J. S. Mill's Utilifarianiwi. 



SANCTIONS OF THE RIGHT. Yl 

men so closely that his individuality is almost lost in 
the common humanity of which he is a fragment. 
With this humanity he thinks and feels and acts, 
sharing its movements — even sensitive to its pulsa- 
tions. Now all this, which is in fact the larger part 
of his own being, is arrayed against him, in reality or 
in more dread imagination, when he does the wrong, 
but concurs with and applauds him when he subdues 
the sensational, and asserts, for humanity as well as 
for himself, the manhood of will. The wrong-doer has 
not been able to act for himself alone — he cannot do 
so if he would, — he has degraded the common na- 
ture which he shares, and is cast out by it into 
moral banishment. The weariness and longing of 
the exile burden him. Even where his wrong is 
undetected, it secretly isolates him from his kind : 
he is alone. 

Nor is this all ; the face of God is averted. Man 
IS endowed with the power of looking back to the 
Father of his spirit and beholding in His glory the 
bright vision of all excellence, and finding there the 
perennial source of daily life to his soul — the consum- 
mation of all joy, felicity become blessedness. But 
now he looks in vain. There is discord here too. 
His moral pain becomes agony — he vnu^l forget God 
or die.-^ The approbation of our fellow-men is not 
merely an external act proceeding from them which 
stirs in us a superficial pleasure ; it is, properly under- 
stood, the harmony of the spiritual life of the individual 

1 See Sophocles, passim. 



72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

with the general life, which, as it were, guarantees 
and sustains its own ; it is the accord of the partial 
soul with the universal. In like manner, the approba- 
tion of God is too often spoken of as if it were an 
extra-mundane, extra-human relationship, and not of 
the essence of the inner life of man. 

Divorced from both, where shall the wrong-doer 
find relief? What deed shall he do, what sacrifice 
shall he make, to re-unite the broken link of sympathy 
with man and communion with God? This is the 
utterance of Eemorse. 

Such and so great is the punishment of a wronged 
manhood, — nor does it end here ; for so great is the 
dependence of man on powers around him and above 
him, that his already humbled personality trembles 
with fear as he realizes in imagination, or perhaps 
already experiences in fact, the adventitious pains 
(which with the Utilitarian are all in all), sj^iritual 
and physical, which a disapproving humanity and 
an offended God must, by a law of things, inflict. 

Fourthly, The wrong-doer feels and apprehends 
that a Law has been broken. With the discernment 
of the higher felicity is associated a sense of law 
commanding that the higher felicity shall govern the 
will. What amoral 4aw' as emotional phenomenon 
may be in its origin and character, and what the 
real nature of the pain of a violation of law, we shall 
endeavour to ascertain in the next chapter. Here we 
have to do with the fact as it exists in the conscious- 



SANCTIONS OF THE EIGHT. 73 

ness of every man advanced beyond the first stage of 
moral experience. It is in relation to the fact of an 
inner law adhering to the right act that the terms 
* Ought/ 'Duty/ and 'Obligation' find their moral 
significance. A moral agent quickly learns that it is 
not only better for him that he should do the right 
act, — that he not only thereby afiirms the high and 
negatives the low, that he not only gains the victory 
of manhood over non-conscious nature, that he not 
only rivets the fink between himself and his kind and 
between himself and God ; but, in addition to all 
this, he also finds that there is an inner and spiritual 
imperativeness and obligation associated with the 
right act which he disobeys at his peril. He is 
'bound' to do the right: it is his 'duty.' This 
feeling of law or imperativeness, which is defied by 
the wrong-doer, is distinct from any of those feelings 
which we have yet discriminated as accompanying 
the performance of the right ; and the pain of violated 
law is distinct from those other pains which we have 
already pointed out as following the doing of the wrong. 
If not distinct in their ultimate analysis, they are at 
least distinguishable as they stand and operate in 
consciousness. The analysis of the inner sense of 
law may show that it has a history in the human 
mind, that it grows and does not lecq^ into life. Be 
that as it may, there it stands in almost omnipotent 
strength, coming into consciousness, as our analysis 
will show, after a certain fashion and subject to 
certain pre-conditions, but none the less subsisting as a 



74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

spiritual entity in human consciousness, ever-present, 
ever-dominant, ever avenging. 

This idea of law may be entertained merely as the 
law of a man's own constitution or the constitution of 
the human race : but should a moral agent have attained 
to the idea of God as a spiritual being, it is impossible 
for him to apprehend the law of his nature without 
associatmg it with the creative will of God — with 
God as Supreme Lawgiver. This, however, is not 
an essential characteristic of the idea of law, though 
intensifying it to an infinite degree. 

We have now separated, from the complexity in 
which they present themselves in consciousness, those 
pains, and, by implication (or explicitly) those felici 
ties, which are the sanctions of the Eight Act : from 
all which it appears that in the doing of the Eight Act 
there is first the higher felicity inherent in the act 
itself to serve as a motive to the will and to reward ; 
and besides this, numerous other felicities, of which 
the most intense is the sense of virtue (as we have 
defined it) and of law obeyed, duty done, obliga- 
tion fulfilled. Besides these, there are many ad- 
ventitious supports — such as the consequences of the 
disapprobation of man and God, which are to be 
distinguished from the mere fact of broken sym- 
pathy and communion, which are pains in them- 
selves : we here purposely confine ourselves to what 
we consider to be the j^'^^i'inary and ultimate grounds 
of obligation. 



SANCTIONS OF THE RIGHT. 75 

This analysis, while revealing the strong protection 
and numerous supports which the Creator of man has 
wisely provided for the Eight, would bear wide and 
instructive application to the history^ of our race, and 
to differences of personal character -^ leading us into 
those regions of ethics in which epoch, circumstances, 
and idiosyncrasy play so large a part. 

The above chapter answers the question — Why 
should a man choose the higher Felicity ? It brings 
to view the inner sanctions of the Eight,, the felicities 
which attractively compel in the upward path, and the 
infelicities which repel from the downward ; it reveals 
the manhood of virtue, and the imperious inner com- 
mand of Law. The further analysis of the Sense of 
Law will throw additional light on the sanctions of 
the Eight. 

■I We need only poiut to the divisions of personal character which 
they suggest, and which, in practical life, are familiar to us all — (1. ) the man 
whose morality floats Hghtly on the surface of the apjjrobation of others ; 
a thing of external supports, trustworthy only while the foundation on 
which it rests remains. (2.) The man whose sympathetic sensibilities 
make his dependence on the good-will of his fellows something much 
deeper than the mere love of approbation, and whose morality is thus 
guaranteed by his humanity. (3.) The man whose morality has taken 
the form of secondary maxims and of Law, and who, rigid and stiff, 
is stable and trustworthy within the Kmits of his vision — the true Con- 
servative in ethics — the man of Duty. (4.) The man whose morality seems 
a part of his vigorous and free seK-assertion — the man of Virtue, (5. ) The 
man — highest of all — who rests his morality on the ultimate perception 
of that which gives it primary validity and obligation, seeing the law in 
the high felicitous end, and is thus armed on every side against invasion. 
This man has a Platonic vision of morality. All men alike may carry up 
their morality, of whatsover character it may be, into the nature and 
will of God. Religion consummates and mamtains Morality ; but it 
does not create it. 



76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

Before passing from this chapter, let us note 
two corollaries. Any one, or all, of the sanctions of 
the Right may constitute ends and criteria of action 
to a man. And, in so far as he acts with a view to 
the end or criterion. Law, Virtue, God, which assume 
a notional existence in his mind, he acts rightly 
relatively to the neai" and subjective criterion. The 
ulterior Rightness (in transitive acts) is, as we have 
said before, a question of direct and collateral inci- 
dence. 

Again, the vain and irrelevant question of the pos- 
sibility of ' Disinterestedness' seems to be disposed of 
Disinterestedness assuredly does exist in the sense of 
the free and virtuous willing of those higher or greater 
felicities which transcend the lower, and which we 
strongly will to gratify at the expense of all lower, 
material, interested, or selfish felicities ; but disinter- 
estedness, in the sense of acting without regard to 
felicity, there is not, and it would be easy to prove 
that there could not be, in a sentient being. Zeno 
himself would accept this conclusion. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

On the Sense of Inner Law. 

That the sense of law, or imperativeness, does not 
arbitrarily attacli itself to the particular act which 
is right, we have already shown. It is guided in 
its attachment by the Felicity which is discerned to 
be higher in quality, or greater in quantity, and is, 
therefore, limited by the range of internal and ex- 
ternal experience. This experience will, as it widens, 
cause the finger of Law to rise and fall. Law does 
not assume the function of discriminating or indi- 
cating the Eight : it follows in the wake of the 
discriminator and indicator. Felicity. This is the 
lesson of history as well as of analysis, and of the 
patent phenomena of childhood as well as of cotem- 
porary savagedom. To illustrate the position in 
detail would be, after all that has been written in 
this direction, a waste of words. 

Let it not be supposed that it follows, from what 
has been said, that man is, even in his most barbarous 
condition, without distinctions of Eight and Wrong, 
and without a concurrent feeling of Law and Duty. 
Our argument simply shows that the Eight means 



78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

conformity to a standard, and that tlie sense of Law 
and Duty cannot discriminate Eight, and cannot 
be that standard, but can only sanction and confirm 
the right when found. This is true, whether we 
regard the progress from some prevailing and ac- 
cepted notion of Right to one based on a larger 
quantity, or to one based on a higher quality of 
felicity. 

We have already shown that the inner utterance 
of Law, or imperativeness, cannot test and discrimi- 
nate acts and states of will, even if it he that mys- 
terious and unanalysable phenomenon which one 
school of thought maintains directly, or by impli- 
cation, that it is. If analysable, our argument is 
strengthened, if that, indeed, be necessary. 

Now, that the Sense of Law is analysable in its 
history, and capable of a more ultimate form of 
expression, will appear, if we fix our attention for 
a time on the mental emotions of the savage hunter, 
whose benevolent propensity has already served us 
in good stead. When, in the course of his yet short 
experience, he first realizes that felicity in the felicity 
of others which we call Goodwill, and which prompts 
him to divide his kid, he acquires a distinct feeling, 
which is separated from all others by his knowing- 
faculty, raised to the position of a rational or moral 
entity in his mind, — thenceforth to enter as a great 
fact into his everyday Idfe, as a powerful constituent 
among his elements of judgment, and as a potent 



THE SENSE OF LAW. 79 

influence among the motives which surround his 
will. The sentiment exists as a distinct moral indi- 
viduality, and asserts, by virtue of this, its right to a 
place in the council of the will. But there is no law 
yet apprehended by this primitive agent as impelling 
him to yield to the suggestions of Goodwill, but only 
the felicity of the emotion itself. But, contemning 
such suggestions, he may hastily choose the lower 
Felicity. As he advances in life and knowledge, 
however, he comes to perceive and experience those 
pains of an ignored higher, of a denied high, of a 
forfeited manhood, of a disapproving fellow-man, of 
an ofiended God, which we have in the last chapter 
enumerated as the sanctions of the right ; and through 
these pains, he is gradually compelled to recognise in 
the higher Felicity that which he must henceforth 
seek, or suffer. He is, in other words, forced into 
the higher state of will as his right habit of mind 
and the director of all his acts, on pain of punish- 
ment, which, by the very constitution of his 
nature, may possibly reach the aggravation of moral 
death. Imperativeness and Obligation not only 
leap out of the heart of the Right, as we shall 
show in the end of this chapter, but they also 
leap into it. The sense of Law, generally treated 
as so mysterious in its origin and character, 
seems to us to be nothing more than a feeling of 
Force brought to bear on a man's self or will in 
connexion with a certain class of acts in preference 
to another and lower class. It differs from the 



80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

non-conscious or sensational force of Appetite in 
this, that it is a Force which comes into knowledge, 
though not into existence, by virtue of the inner and 
outer experience of the consequences of acts. Reason 
is the pre-condition of all that is characteristic in it, 
and it may, therefore, be regarded as an emanation from 
the self or personality of man — a rational affirmation 
of that higher Force in the scheme of things and in 
the experience of consciousness which transcends, 
hy virtue of the conditions of its discrimination, 
the non-rational, sensational movements which dis- 
turb or delight the soul of man. It is, when 
fundamentally apprehended, Self, that is, Man, as- 
serting himself through the operations of his rational 
intelligence against and over nature. 

The sense of Law^ may be anew explained as 
being the perception of the protection, through the 
instrumentality of Pain, of certain sentiments or 
principles of action ; or, conversely, as the limi- 
tation of certain desires and principles of action 
by Pain. The distinction between the force which 
is inherent in certain sentiments and principles 
as Law, and that which belongs to Appetite or 
Desire, may be further explained by sajdng that 
the one is the free recognition or perception of 
Force by man, and, therefore, in some sense, self- 
constituted, while the other is the feeling of Force 

^ We are here considering Law witli respect to its origin in hioioledge. 
This is attained through negative or penal processes. The higher 
positive aspect of Law is considered further on. 



NEGATIVE ASPECT OF LAW. 81 

coming within the range of consciousness without 
an effort of the wilL The one is natural, and has its 
source in nature ; the other is rational, and has its 
source in the free activity of human personality 
— in that which is distinctively mail. Law, then, 
is the consciousness of Force driving, and (as we 
shall show in the end of this chapter) drawing 
the will into a certain course of action : it is Force 
moralized. 

That we are right in distinguishing the ultimate 
expression of the sense of moral Law to be a per- 
ception of Force, under particular conditions of self- 
consciousness, and in evolving the knowledge of it 
chiefly out of pain, is supported by the following 
considerations : — 

The sense of Law is the sense of a formal 
command that contains in itself nothing, save the 
fact of imperativeness which associates itself with 
certain sentiments or principles of action, or (to 
keep more closely to our previous phraseology) with 
certain felicities regarded as ends and motives of 
action. If the inner utterance of Law leap into 
consciousness without a history or genealogy, as the 
most mysterious as well as the greatest fact in the 
moral economy of man, it could never alter or modify 
its essential characteristic — that of pure command. 
There cannot be a Law which, qua Law, is stronger 
or more imperative than another. Now, it will not 
be averred, we suppose, by any, that every utterance 
of Law is of equal strength, or imposes on the will 



82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

of man an equally imperative and irresistible obli- 
gation. The Law whicli is associated with my giving 
priority to the higher felicity of aesthetic sentiment 
over that of appetite, when they stand in antagonism 
in presence of the suspended will, is imperative ; but 
it is not so imperative and obhgatory as that sense 
of Law which elevates the sentiment of Good^vill 
towards others above the satisfaction of the most 
refined aesthetic sentiments, while both, again, are 
much less imperative than the sentiment of Justice. 
How do I know that the moral Force of these differ- 
ent sentiments — both those which concern my Transi- 
tive and those which concern my Intransitive acts 
and states of mil — varies ? By the natm^e and 
intensity of the pain of violating them. Can any 
man maintain that his remorse in so indulging his 
love of festive enjoyments (for example) as to ex- 
clude himself from the higher felicities of external 
Nature and of Art can be for a moment compared 
with that which burdens him when ine^dtable memory 
reveals to his remorseful soul an unjust, or a cruel, 
or a mean, or an impious act ? No one, I believe, 
will, even in the cause of a philosophical party, so 
say. But an unanalysable law is Law, and as a 
formal utterance of mysterious command, it ought not 
to vary its quality or force ; and as a consequence of 
this, the remorse of violation ought not to be greater in 
one case of immorality than in another ; which is con- 
trary to fact. Therefore, moral Law, in this mysteri- 
ous, unanalysable sense, which makes it appear to be 



NEGATIVE ASPECT OF LAW. 83 

a sudden and inexplicable projection of the Divine 
Will into tlie heart of man, does not exist. 

But if the actual facts of our moral consciousness 
are found not only to consist with the sense of Law, 
^dewed as Force rationally apprehended through the 
experience of ]Dain, but even to furnish the most 
apt illustrations of the truth of this view, we must 
be content to rest in our analysis till a better be 
found. That they do so, a very short consideration 
of the facts above cited sufficiently establishes, while 
the whole history of the growth of a rational soul 
and of the human race contributes its superfluous 
support. 

The fact that Law is associated in one place, 
and at one epoch, vdth acts which, at another time 
and in another place, are condemned or regarded 
as of minor importance, is explained vdthout dam- 
age to the foundations of Morality (as we shall after- 
wards more fully show), or to the supremacy of the 
idea or sentiment of Law in the human conscious- 
ness, when that sentiment is properly understood. 
The above interpretation of inner Law as being- 
moralized Force does not shake Law or its power, 
although it implies that the individual and the race 
exhibit an ever-progressive gTowth in the knoAvledge 
of morality and of its sanctions. Nor is anything 
else compatible with the facts of experience. The 
personal history of each man from infancy to ma- 
turity, and the larger history of mankind, is a history 
of moral progress, not only in respect of the per- 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

ceptions of the right, but also of the extent of its 
sanctions, and in an ever-deepening feehng of the 
imperativeness of Moral Law. The search after the 
felicities higher in quality or greater in quantity than 
those which outward occasion brings within the range 
of the consciousness of the infant race, as of the infant 
man — the endeavour to adapt the hourly willing and 
acting to those felicities which form the standard of 
life — the realizing of the ever-widening sanctions of 
the right and of the supreme and obligatory Law 
which is imprinted on its front, — is not this, in fact, 
a summary of the moral history of civilisation, and 
also of the doctrine of the criterion of the right and 
of the sanctions of the right, to which our analysis 
of the phenomena of consciousness has gradually 
led us in these pages ? 

The varying force of the imperativeness of law is 
conspicuous, not only when felicities of different 
qualities conflict in consciousness, but also when the 
will is balanced between different quantities of the 
same kind of felicity. The savage, for example, finds 
one of his chief pleasures in gorging to excess. The 
pain which follows brings penitence, but both are 
alike shortlived. The unpractised will has not yet 
sufficiently emerged above the sensational naturalism 
of barbarism to fix in consciousness the past as well as 
the present, and to forecast the possible future arising 
out of both. The untutored and unfashioned will 
breaks down under the pressure of the passing desire. 
It is only by degrees that a man attains to the rank of 



NEGATIVE ASPECT OF LAW. 85 

a ' being of large discourse, looking before and after/ 
and is able to seize in thought the greater quantity of 
fehcity, and constitute it the rightful master of his 
will. The moment, however, that he begins to enter- 
tain the wish to do this, he must attach to the act of 
gorging the j)erception of wrong and the feeling of 
violated law ; the now discerned law (discerned by the 
help of the schoolmaster, pain) being that he shall 
control his appetite, with a view to a larger amount of 
physical felicity than could be attained by not control- 
ling it. Compare his elementary sense of law or moral 
force with that which the cultivated man of Christian 
civilisation feels with reference to the same act, and 
ascertain the grounds of its greater intensity and im- 
perativeness, and we shall find that the sense of law 
associated with a certain class of temperate acts, groius 
with the growth of reason (in the larger sense of that^ 
term). And this is to say, that it grows with man's 
extending perceptions of the large bearing, both direct 
and indirect, of control of appetite on his physical 
welfare, and this again is revealed to him through the 
pains of different kinds, to which, as his widening 
experience teaches, the violation of the law exposes 
him. Then, further, the harmony that subsists be- 
tween all moral acts, causes that the one shall come to 
the help of the other ; and thus, that which at first 
has been regarded as the adaptation of conduct to the 
securing of a greater quantity of felicity is further 
apprehended to be indhectly also the assertion of the 
rightful domination of the higher quality of felicities 



86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

over tlie lower. It thus borrows the sanctions which 
enforce the higher. 

Again, to keep still within the same range of 
illustration, there are at this moment, intellectual con- 
victions, growing up into laws before our very eyes. 
There are men who, under the influence of a desii'e for 
immediate physical ease, avoid, if they do not abhor, 
bathing ; there are others at the opposite end of the 
scale, who so fully realize the efi'ects hurtful or bene- 
ficial of the two acts respectively, that they regard a 
proper attention to the skin of the body as a law 
of health, by which they understand a law of the 
human economy, and therefore imperative. Such men 
feel a moral pain when, under the influence of some 
love of ease, they weakly neglect the physiological 
duty : they feel that they have done wTong, and that 
they have broken a laio — a law^ of much lower inten- 
sity than certain other laws of conduct ; but yet a 
law. 

But we have been dealing with law in its negative 
and prohibitory aspect only. The forces which sur- 
round the will, and w^hich to the intellect of man 
take the notional form of law, have their sources 
otherwhere than in pain, although (as we have seen) 
pain is the schoolmaster by whom w^ e are first taught 
wherein lies the Positive law of moral life, nor does our 
Master ever at any time manumit us while we remain 
under the present conditions of rational life. But 
in the spiritual as in the material world, there exists 



POSITIVE LAW. 87 

the force of Attraction as well as the force of Co- 
ercion. The felicity which any contemplated end 
yields acts with magnetic power on the will — with a 
gentle but steady constraint. The end of man's con- 
stitution is manifestly virtue, says Bishop Butler, and 
that which a consideration of any constitution declares 
to be its end, is at the same time, and ipso facto, 
obligatory. By this must be meant, that we attach to 
it, or feel to be resident in it the force and imperative- 
ness of law ; if so, this is substantially the same 
doctrine as that enunciated above. The force of the 
attraction of the felicitous end is moralized into law. 
End and Law are seen to be inseparable in thought.-^ 

Again, all those other subjective and objective 
coercive collateral forces which we have spoken of 
above, have also their positive side, and attract man 
by the constraint of perceived felicity, and therefore 
are supports of the perceived felicitous end and the 
consequent moral law. But note, that powerful as 
these forces are, especially the sentiment of virtue (as 
we have defined that word), they do not, even in 
their positive aspect, constitute the primary ground 
of the perception of positive law, but are, properly 
speaking, only protective and subsidiary. 

But if we reject the powerful coercive forces as the 
primary ground of law even when they directly touch 
the sentiments, how much more shall we repudiate the 

^ The connexion of coercive and attractive forces with the classifica- 
tion of duties into those of perfect and imperfect, or determinate and 
indeterminate, obligation, can be here only suggested. 



88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

Utilitarian doctrine, that the external penal conse- 
quences of unjust acts are the sole sanctions and 
source of law, and of the idea of obligation and 
duty ! This doctrine, consistently enough, leads to the 
conclusion, that conscience has its source and arche- 
type in external law, and is merely ' an ideal resem- 
blance of public authority growing up in the individual 
mind/^ 

The additional sanction and force which encompass 
and enter into the sense of law in the mind of man, 
when he learns to discern in all right ends, the will of 
a God ever present in His own creations, consummates 
the notion of law, although it is not essential to its 
existence any more than religion is essential to the 
existence (though it is necessary to the maintenance) 
of morality. It carries the sense of law into the 
infinite and eternal. But even in this its highest 
aspect, the notion of law, when closely analysed, will 
be found to yield only the notion of force coercive and 
force attractive, moralized. This doctrine could be 
evolved in detail, were this the place to enter, in any 
but the most general terms, into the question of the 
confines and mutual inter-penetration of religion and 
morality. 

The purely mi5eZte^^a? perception of the enc?of any 
sentient existence, which we may also call the law of 
that existence, contributes its support, when it is 

i Professor Baiu's Emotions and the Will, p. 287. 



DIVINE SENSE OF LAW. 89 

discerned, to those positive and negative notions of 
law which lie within the moral sphere ; but it is not 
to be confounded with them. 

The love of theoretical simplicity must not tempt 
us to the conclusion that the above analysis of laAV 
exhausts all that is to be said regarding the co-relative 
sentiment of Duty. This feeling, sentiment, or idea 
of duty, which even Mr. Mill (if we understand him 
aright), Utilitarian though he be, prefers to leave 
unanalysed, and to regard as something resident in the 
mental economy of man, which attaches itself to the 
right by a law of his constitution, is in truth the co- 
relative of law — the instinctive response which our 
nature gives to the notion of law. I say instinctive; 
for, did it not involve a departing from the strict line 
of this disquisition, it might not be difficult to show 
that there exists in man an instinctive, connate impulse 
of submission, obedience, veneration (the name here 
matters little), counterbalancing the self-assertion of 
individuality, looking up expectant and responsive to 
the notion of law, and, in this relation, constituting the 
sentiment of Duty. 



CHAPTER X. 

Tlw Immiitahility of Morality. 

ovhh (rd^ueiv roaovrov 'Joixrjv to, era 
KTjpvyfJiad'' (haT dypaTra KaacpaXrj ^e(2v 
vbiiLjxa dvuaadaL '^vtjtop cvd'' virep^paixeiv. 
ov yap Tc vvv re Kax^es, dW del wore 
^y ravra, KoiiSels oUev e| 6'rou '(pdvTj. 

Soph. Antig. 451. 

' MoEAL law is iinchangeable/ it may be urged — ' it is 
founded on tlie absolute wilP and fiat of God, and is 
as immutable and stable as the foundation on wliich 
it rests. The doctrine, however, which the present 
analysis affects to reveal or expound would almost 
seem to make the moral law dependent on time, place 
and circumstance — a thing of chronology, geography 
and environment. The right and the wrong, and 
therefore the inner law which commands the right, 
and the penalties which sanction it, fluctuate, — pro- 
gressing or retrograding with man's experience and 
needs, and being thus dependent on the accidents of 
his position.' 

^ There is a manifest sense in which this may be maintained without 
involving ourselves in the doctrine of Ockham, and some theologians even 
now — that the command of God constitutes morality, and that, were He 
to command murder and theft to beings constituted as we are, murder 
and theft would be morally right and obligatory. 



THE IMMUTABILITY OF MORALITY. 91 

Those who urge such objections are apt to con- 
found the fact of morality with the forms which 
practical moral rules take under the influence of time 
and circumstance, and to assume that progressiveness 
necessarily implies mutability. In every stage of 
human society, as well as in the education of the 
individual man at this moment, there is a right and 
a wrong, a good and a bad : this, it is presumed, no 
one denies. But the dependence of moral growth on 
inward and outward occasion and circumstance prevents 
the early and instantaneous realization of the various 
felicities of desire or sentiment possible for man, and 
the consequent perception of the supreme laws of his 
being, while the adequate conception of the greater 
and less quantities of any particular felicity (the 
conditions of physical well-being for example), which 
flow from certain kinds of acts isolated or habitual, is 
a matter necessarily dependent on the experience of 
many successive generations. Are not these things 
matters of historical fact ? Do they not exhibit 
themselves at this hour in the child and the adult ? 
Were we to classify men morally, whether past or 
cotemporary, should we not classify them according 
to the elevation of moral vision to which they have 
attained, as well as of the moral habits which they 
have acquired? Elevations and subsidence of the 
moral strata mark the rise and the decline of nations 
and of individuals. 

By what ingenuity of reasoning can the immuta- 
bility of morality be maintained in the face of the 



92 THE PHILOSOPHY OP ETHICS. 

moral history of the human race, if by the phrase be 
meant that at all times and in all places equally, the 
right and wrong in particular acts is affirmed by an 
inner sentimental faculty, or an unerring intellectual 
perception ? With Hobbes on one side and Helvetius 
on the other, it was necessary stoutly to maintain the 
immutability of morality in the Platonic sense — a sense 
which this analysis in point of fact vindicates and 
confirms. For the doctrine maintained in these pages 
vindicates the permanence of moral distinctions and 
the subjective source of morality, while furnishing an 
explanation of variableness of opinion. The delibe- 
rate perversities of different nations afford no serious 
difficulty when they are fully understood — when they 
are beheld in the light of a doctrine which regards 
man as a being progressively feeling his way towards 
self-knowledge, and thereby to a knowledge of his 
true well-being as an individual and a member 
of a civil society. We may discern in the Spartan 
theft a weapon formed against the enemy, and en- 
couraged because its ultimate effects in demoralizing 
the youth and dissolving society were not yet per- 
ceived, or were regarded as small matters compared 
with defence against the alien. It is easy to recog- 
nise in the authorization of Eeligious revels by 
the moral guides of the people a worship of the 
bountiful and fruitful all-mother — good in itself, and 
until the inevitable excess of such wild devotion 
produced evils over which not even religion could 
throw a veil. It is easy to understand a national 



THE IMMUTABILITY OF MORALITY. 93 

judgment in favour of polygamy — when the idea of 
womans place as a helpmate and her subordinate 
equality in the social system is not yet revealed to the 
obtuse perceptions of the self-seeking stronger sex. 
Nor is it difficult even to explain a deliberate opinion 
in palliation, if not in favour, of promiscuous inter- 
course among those who have never felt for them- 
selves, and whose sympathetic imagination is too weak 
to apprehend through others, the moral atmosphere 
which surrounds the family, the justice which by it 
alone can be secured to the young, and the stability 
which it gives to the State. Nor is it impossible for 
us to understand the prevalence, even in a professedly 
Christian community, of lax opinions regarding adul- 
tery, where marriage has been reduced through the 
influence of material tendencies into a social compact, 
unsanctioned and unblessed by love, which in turn 
avenges itself by taking the form of unlicensed desire ; 
and so forth. The most hasty glance at the moral 
facts of history will satisfy us that the governing 
sentiments and ruling principles of one epoch are 
gradually supplanted by those of another as the mind 
advances to fuller realization of the higher felicities 
of man, or retrogrades under the debasing influence 
of luxury, sloth and effeminacy, till the virtues of a 
nation's greater past become only a dim memory. 
The sentiments and the principles of right human 
action do not therefore alter. 

While the range and height of moral vision are 
thus limited by time and circumstance in accordance 



94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

with the scheme of the Divine o;overnment, Morality 
itself as a statement of the end and duty of man does 
not therefore alter its essential character. Had some 
inspired premonition enabled an ancient Egyptian to 
divine and ennnciate the doctrines of the morality of 
Christ, these doctrines would have been as true an ex- 
position then, as they are now, of the duty and destiny 
of man ; but they would have outrun too far the then 
moral capacity of the race, and anticipated the fulness 
of time. The scheme of man's duty, like the scheme 
of man's nature, is, and remains a living and never- 
changing fact, but man's apprehension of both is 
laborious and slow ; reached only after many errors, 
and throuo;h much individual and national sufferino;. 
And slow as is the apprehension of the right, how 
much more tardy a process must be the perfect 
fashioning of the human will in accordance with the 
right after it has been recognised ! 

' But,' it may be objected, 'where the apprehension of 
the right thus changes according to the law of progres- 
sion, who will fix the eye once for all at the true eleva- 
tion, and guarantee its truth, should there be prevalent 
dimness of vision or difference of opinion ? ' The answer 
to this objection has been already implicitly given. 
Where quantity of felicity is concerned (and questions 
of quantity in reality cover the greater part of human 
life), the reason is competent to ascertain and establish 
the truth ; where questions of quality are concerned, 
the mind is so constituted, that it possesses the power 
of sentient discrimination of quality. It is true, that 



THE IMMUTABILITY OF MORALITY. 95 

individuals may err, and be unable to reach in thought 
either the conclusions of experience, or the supreme 
joy yielded by the higher sentiments (as is the case 
with children, savages, and the adult waifs of civilisa- 
tion at this moment), or if able to apprehend them 
and to attain to the vision of the perfect union of 
blessedness and law, their glimpses may be but tran- 
sient, and their weak unpractised wills may leave the 
governing ideas of human life standing outside their 
personality. 

The immutability of morality, accordingly, is to be 
found in the immutability of the nature of man as 
that nature was conceived by his Creator. Morality 
is as eternal and immutable as the rest of the economy 
of the spiritual universe. To the Divine conception, 
it is true, men slowly and at best only partially attain, 
even with the help of the teaching of Christ. To the 
practical identification with that conception of the 
movements of their individual wills they never, under 
the present conditions of life, can attain. For when 
a man has advanced to the full consciousness of the 
nature and power of the sentiments which are in all 
epochs more or less operative, he is often intellec- 
tually unable, because of defective experience and 
limited vision, to regulate either the transitive or 
intransitive acts which issue from these sentiments in 
such a way as to square them with his criterion. 
And even when he not only fully recognises the 
governing sentiments as immediate ends, but is also 
able to discern truly the right operation of these 



96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

towards their ulterior ends, weakness of will too 
commonly succeeds to the place from which judicial 
blindness has been driven. 

Should it be further objected, that the precepts of 
morality at any one epoch of history are thus made 
dependent on a knowledge of human nature, and that 
progress in the apprehension of the right thus practi- 
cally resolves itself into progress in anthropology, the 
reply is, that the inference of the objector is a sound 
one, and obviously accordant with the facts of history. 

If it be feared, as by some timid moralists it is 
feared, that such a doctrine compels us to judge 
nations and individuals, from a combined considera- 
tion of the moral ideas (whether these be sentiments or 
generalizations of experience) which they have ad- 
mitted into their intellects as part of their permanent 
stock of moral life, and of the inevitable circumstances 
under which they lived and acted, it is to be regretted 
that a doctrine at once so charitable in its indi^ddual 
judgments, and so stimulative of efforts for the im- 
provement of mankind, should be an object of aver- 
sion. It is a truism to say that our moral judgments 
on individuals may be relaxed without our thereby 
relaxing either the scheme of morality or the impera- 
tiveness of law. 



CHAPTEE XL 

The Moral Sentiments. 

Ethical analysis postulates a scheme of psychology, or 
rather of anthropology. It is assumed that man is a 
being of certain desires, sentiments, and activities, which 
each in its turn demands an object, and with the object a 
corresponding felicity of satisfaction, and that these are 
classified with sufiicient accuracy for the purposes of 
Ethical inquiry, as Appetitive, Social, Intellectual, Es- 
thetic, Moral {i.e., the sentiments of Benevolence and 
Justice), and Eeligious. A pre-condition of aU feelings 
which have regard to others, directly or indirectly, is 
Sympathy. But this capacity, though possessed by 
man in so much higher a degree than by the irrational 
animals as to be almost a distinguishing characteristic, 
is not powerful enough to account for the moral senti- 
ments of Goodwill and Justice. It is a common basis 
of these sentiments, and of all those subordinate moral 
feelings which first come into consciousness as we 
become aware of our relationship to other sentient 
beings ; but it does not of itself account for them. 

That the appetitive desires, the gregarious instinct 
in its more refined form of social feeling and its intense 
manifestation in the domestic afi'ections when Mar- 



98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

riage and Family have established themselves among 
men, the sentiment of Goodwill or Benevolence, the 
fact and the ^9^ert5^M'e of intellectual activity — that 
these are primordial constituent elements of man's 
nature, that they are connate, though waiting for out- 
ward or inward occasion to call them into consciousness, 
and that they are distinct one from the other, are 
facts so generally admitted that it would be irrele- 
vant to our present purpose analytically to pursue 
each to its ultimate genetic form, and determine its 
relations to the rest of the economy of consciousness. 
The instinct of Obedience, which, when contemplated 
by the intellect in its moral relations, becomes a 
sentiment, and which in its highest form appears as 
Eeverence, the feeling and love of power, and the 
idea of perfection, which lies on the borderland of 
intellect and sentiment, might possibly,^ were this the 
place for doing so, be shown to be distinct modes of 
consciousness, but may be at present passed by as not 
essential to the determination of the questions which 
immediately concern us. 

It may be that some moral analysts of the Utilitarian 
school are still to be found, who, in their psychology, 
profess to trace the higher sentiments and the felicities 
they yield ultimately to the pleasures, pains, and move- 
ments of the body. The sentiments would thus become 
either the vain illusions of Fancy given by the gods to 

^ I say ' possibly, ' for the whole of this department of conseionsiiess 
demands reconsideration and revindication ; and one of the most important 
tasks of the time would be an adequate ' critique of sentiment.' 



THE MORAL SENTIMENTS. 99 

ratiocinating brutes to mock while they adorn hfe, 
and to give existence the glitter without the substance 
of gold, or they would be disguised devices resorted to 
by men for the better protection of material pleasures 
and interests. But the modern leaders of the Utilitarian 
school present no such scheme for our adoption ; least 
of all their master, David Hume/ Two facts are ad- 
mitted by them into their more recent statement of 
doctrine, namely — (l.) that Benevolence or Goodwill, 
that is, felicity in the felicity of others, is a feeling 
unanalysable, and, therefore, an ultimate form of 
intelligent life : from which they ought to draw 
the conclusion that it finds its reward in itself, and 
is, therefore, an end to itself, not merely a means 
towards the more remote end, the material felicity 
of others or self: (2.) that the pleasures Avhich con- 
stitute motives and ends to the human will vary 
in hind and quality ; which is to say that there are 
higher and lower felicities possible for man, not merely 
greater and less in respect of quantity, stability, and 
duration. If, then, higher pleasures be possible, what 
are these ? They can be nothing else than those plea- 
sures which the necessities of thought and language 
have hitherto compelled and still compel men to dis- 
tinguish from the ' lower' by the designation spiritual 
— the pleasures, or (as we prefer to call them) the 

^ Bentliam is vulgarly considered to be tlie cMef representative and 
originator of tlie Utilitarian theory of Ethics. He is neither the one nor 
the other. Utilitarianism is almost as old as Epicnrns, if not consider- 
ably older, I do not mean that modern Utilitarianism, in the hands of 
any of its accepted advocates, is identical with Epicureanism ; but it is 
parallel with it as a scheme of ethical thought, and rests ultimately on a 
similar view of the nature of man. 



100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

felicities of the sentiments — considered as ends. Any 
reader, who has followed the preceding analysis, must 
perceive that the admission of these two notions as 
factors, in making up the possible sum of human hap- 
piness, is an irrecoverable step of departure from a 
strictly logical Utilitarianism, and involves the sub- 
version of the Utilitarian ethical system in its stricter 
sense. The sentiments of the Just, the Beautiful, and 
of the Divine or Eeligious, present grccxter difficulties 
to the analyst, but theh^ inner history, and the question 
of their simplicity or complexity, cannot affect their 
place in a scheme of Ethics, so long as they subsist in 
consciousness as substantive sentiments, the satisfac- 
tion of which is desirable in and for itself. 

The word sentiment does not necessarily denote 
an ultimate feeling ; it is used in a much more general 
sense, and doubtless with too great vagueness. Every 
feeling of man which cannot be traced directly to 
physical or intellectual pleasure or pain, we may find 
classed as a sentiment as soon as it becomes an object 
of knowledge.-^ Most of these so-called sentiments 
are in point of fact subordinate forms of sentiments 
already known under more general and more accurate 
names. To undertake an analysis of them, and of 

1 Professor Bain uses t"he word sentiment sometimes to denote the 
primordial feelings which are neither physical nor intellectual, and 
sometimes to denote freakvS, fancies, and unreasoning sympathies and 
antipathies. Hence considerable confusion in his otherwise clear analysis 
of Conscience and Obligation (as seen from his point of view). The 
primordial sentiments seem to hamper him, remaining unaccounted for 
as an element in morality ; they seem in fact, in accordance with his 
strictly logical method, to be extruded from the moral sphere altogether. 



THE MORAL SENTIMENTS. 101 

the so-called virtues which would give us a generalized 
list of the triumphs of man over his lower nature, 
would be interesting and instructive, as exhibiting the 
modifications and combinations of which the various 
sentiments and desires are susceptible, and of human 
character in relation to these. But to do so would 
be to write a treatise on moral philosophy in its widest 
sense, not merely an essay on the principles of morality. 
It is sufficient for the latter purpose that the senti- 
ments to which we have adverted above be admitted 
as subsisting in man in the same sense, though with 
more complexity in their pre-conditions, as the desires 
and as the sentiment of goodwill, and that the satis- 
faction of them yields a felicity peculiar to themselves. 
If this be granted, they at once become both ends and 
motives of conduct, and, entering into competition 
with other fehcitous ends, are either in harmony or 
in antagonism with them. The sentiment of justice, 
of the beautiful (in nature, art, and conduct), and of 
the divine, that is to say of infinite purity and per- 
fection residing in the Source and Sustainer of universal 
life, have an inner and outer history which a careful 
analysis may reveal ; but this history cannot afi*ect the 
fact that they exist as distinguishable phenomena of 
consciousness, and that there belongs to the satisfac- 
tion of each a felicity which cannot be confounded 
with other fehcities. They, no less than the sentiment 
of goodwill, emerge in daily life partially disguised 
in various particular forms. For example, the general 
sentiment of goodwill takes the specific shapes of 
love, generosity, friendship, charity, gratitude : the 



102 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

sentiment of the beautiful appears as the sentiments 
of becomingness, propriety, elegance, and so forth ; 
the sentiment of the just is known in its own every- 
day subordinate forms of the feelings of honesty, 
integrity, truthfulness, and honour.^ 

Then, again, if we leave what may be called the 
sensational or non-conscious sentiments — those which, 
like the desires, arise in thought uninvoked, and 
are constantly putting in their claim for satisfac- 
tion at the court of will, we shall find another class 
of sentiments which we may distinguish as the ' Self- 
conscious,' namely, the sentiments of virtue, of com- 
placence (either of self, or others towards self), and of 
law. The sentiment of virtue sometimes appears as 
a sense of moral dignity, and that of law takes its 
co-relative form of duty. The sentiments non-con- 
scious and self-conscious yield each its own felicity, 
and both kinds constitute adequate motives and ends 
of action to a moral agent.^ 

This brief survey of the large question of the 
moral sentiments is not too summary for the purposes 
of this essay. Though in other respects most perfunc- 
tory and inadequate, a larger treatment could only 
take the form of an elaborate exposition or critique of 
sentiment, and carry us far away from the track which 
leads up to our immediate purpose. 

^ Honour (not the honour of Paley) might perhaps be defined in its 
practical application, as the ready inter[)retation of all questions of 
doubtful equity or morality against one's-self. 

2 The sentiment of Justice forms the subject of special analysis in a 
future chapter. 



CHAPTER XII. 

On the Gradation of Felicities and Sentiments, and on the 
Sitpremacy of the Sentiment of Justice. 

i) ^vvoiKos tCov Kdro) deCov Mktj. — Soph. Antig, 449. 

But, given the fact of the higher sentiments as well 
as of the lower desires, given that man is endued with 
the capacity of discriminating by feeling different 
kinds or qualities of felicity as inherent in them, and 
of discovering by reason the greater and less quantities 
of felicities, and given that the act of morality {qua 
act) is the discernment and deliberate election of the 
higher or greater in preference to the lower or less 
felicity, when two or more claim consideration and 
puzzle the suspended will — given all this, where shall 
we find the ultimate court of appeal for the deter- 
mination of the relative gradation of the desires 
and sentiments, and the assaying of their respective 
qualities ? Who, again, is to determine the quanti- 
tative preferableness of one act as compared with 
another ? A satisfactory answer must be given to this 
question, if the system which we have been expounding 
is to furnish the means of accounting for varieties in 
weight of authority and intensity of obligation. 

Our answer is in substance as old as Plato, and 



104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

is simply this : — Those men are to determine the 
relative qualities and quantities of felicities, and con 
sequent relative force of obligation, who make it their 
business to analyse human experience, and who report 
to their fellow-men such discoveries as correspond 
with the inner and outer history of the race. Should 
any man, as the result of his introspection, defy the 
conclusions to which the cultivated reason of mankind 
has gradually come, and maintain that the 'lower' 
excel the ' higher,' the bodily transcends the spiritual, 
he (naive as the statement may sound) stands self- 
convicted of wilfulness or eccentricity. When the 
question is one of quantity rather than of quahty, 
we go to the same source of information, although in 
all such cases, and they compose the majority, the 
liability to error is increased in consequence of our 
being dependent on the accuracy of our ratiocination 
regarding external things, as w^ell as on the truth and 
range of our observations of the nature of man. 

Thus it is that progress in morality is dependent 
on the progress of knowledge among men, and that 
the basis of right conduct is now, as always, the 
oracular ' Know thyself 

Bat let us avoid generals, and, coming closer to the 
question, imagine a case of mutual conflict between the 
higher sentiments themselves. Suppose one man to 
maintain that the complex transitive sentiment of 
justice claims supremacy over the intransitive religious 
sentiment by virtue of a transcendent inherent felicity, 
and another to claim that supremacy for benevolence^ 



GRADATION OF DUTIES. 105 

and a third for the feeling of the beautiful : what divi- 
nity will arrange, in due ascending and descending 
series, the absolute gradation of felicities and senti- 
ments, and guide the perplexed will ? I, for my part, 
am fully persuaded that the satisfaction of the religious 
sentiment yields in itself a joy which far transcends 
all other felicities ; and that, where many possible 
states of will are at the same moment proposed to 
me, the highest, and therefore the right and the obli- 
gatory, is the religious ; and this to the extinction of 
all claims even of justice and benevolence, if these 
sentiments he considered in themselves and apart 
from the collateral and extrinsic sanctions and sup- 
ports by which they have been surrounded by the 
Creator. And yet it is not to be doubted the satis- 
faction of the sentiment of justice is unquestionably 
more obligatory than the satisfaction of the Eeligious 
sentiment as such. How is this to be explained '? 

Let us steady the intellectual eye with a con- 
crete illustration. Suppose that a man, in a flow 
of emotion stirred up in him by the complex occa- 
sions of life, should be about to hold high com- 
muning with Infinite Perfection and Purity as these 
are conceived to exist in the Absolute Will, and 
to do so surrounded by those circumstances, natural 
or artistic, which raise his soul into the region of 
the Divine, and sustain it there : can he doubt that 
in such an act he is about to satisfy the supreme 
sentiment of his nature, and that the most intense 
felicity of which he is capable, or which he can con- 



106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

ceive, is within his grasp ? But at the same moment 
it happens that some fellow-man has some just claim 
on his regard or attention. The two sentiments — the 
Keligions and the Just, the supreme Intransitive and 
the supreme Transitive — conflict. He must forego 
one in order to eff'ect mental union with the other. 
If he prefer the former, he enjoys unquestionable 
fehcity ; but it is so poisoned by the pain of an unjust 
act, and of broken moral law, that he cannot but 
admit, that, testing his act by the criterion of felicity, 
he has failed to discriminate the act which it behoved 
him to do. But since he has admittedly chosen that 
one of two acts which yielded to himself, in itself, 
the more intense felicity, wherein has he erred ? It 
may l)e said that he has erred, inasmuch as he has 
broken a ' laiv for the sake of enjoying a noble, though 
purely self-regarding, felicity. But this is no explana- 
tion, but only an obscuring of the truth with a word ; 
for the answer at once suggests a further question as 
to the ground of the law alleged to be broken. Our 
answer is consistent ^^dth the past analysis, and is 
this : The self-regarding, religious devotee has broken 
the laws of God and man because he has ignored the 
element of Quantity ; for where the higher and lower 
in Quality conflict, the higher quality determines the 
right act ; but where the antagonism arises among 
sentiments, desires, or felicities of the same general 
quality, though of varying intensities, the element of 
quantity can alone determine the right act. 

In the above case, for example, the just act involves 



SUPREMACY OF JUSTICE. 107 

not merely (as is the case witli the sentiment of the 
Divine) the f elicit}^ of the agent himself in the satis- 
faction of a sentiment in itself, but other felicities : 
namely — 

(l.) The felicity of the agent, in so far as he is 
thereby approved by his fellow-men. 

(2.) The felicity of other men than the agent, — 
namely, the immediate object or objects of the just 
act which the agent is so constituted as to enjoy. 

(3.) The felicity of personal security, which is the 
indispensable condition of all other felicities, and 
which a very short experience of social and civil life 
shows to be dependent on the observance of justice. 

(4.) The felicity in the security of the race as a 
whole, because it is only through the prevalence of such 
acts that society, civilisation, and progress are possible. 
This is an extension of the second and third felicities. 

By these considerations the just act is discrimi- 
nated as transcending the religious act (that is to 
say, the act of religious emotion) in the quantity of 
subjective^ felicity which it yields, and therefore in its 
obligatoriness. To these have to be added all the 
adventitious sanctions which grow out of the appro- 
bation or disapprobation of society, and which help 
to give an irresistible force to the notion of law in 
respect of just acting. 

^ I say -rnhjective, that being the oiily aspect of the question that seriously 
concerns us : the external and adventitious sources of the obhgation of 
justice also contribute their powerful and indispensable aid to the un- 
formed Avill. But these have been fully expounded by Utilitarians — 
especially by Professor Bain in his 'Xotes on Paley,' and in his work on 
the 'Emotions and. the Will.' 



CHAPTER XIII. 

The Supreme Good. 

Nimium boni est cui niliil mali. — Eisrisr. 

By tlie Summum honum is understood the sovereign 
or supreme good of man — the ultimate unity of end 
towards wliicli all his willings and actings should 
tend, and under the light and sanction of which they 
should be done. The answers to the question, 'What 
is the Sovereign Good V resolve themselves into three 
—Virtue, Happiness, Grod. 

Now, it is manifest that the answer which we may 
give to this supreme question is predetermined by an 
answer to a prior question, viz., What test shall a man 
employ in order to discover whether the multitude of 
particular acts and states of will which make up his 
life tend in the direction of the supreme end and law 
of his constitution ? If, with the ancients, we arbitrarily 
determine the general end, and from it argue back to 
the criterion of our individual acts, we deceive our- 
selves. In the act of thus prematurely and arbitrarily 
fixing the supreme end we beg the whole question at 
issue, and introduce confusion into ethical discussion. 
Our business is, in the first place, to detect, in loyal 



THE SUPREME GOOD. 109 

obedience to experience and fact, the common element 
in all acts or states of will which is the distinguishing 
note of their approvableness, and, therefore, of their 
Tightness, in relation to the ultimate purpose of mans 
life. 

Is 'Virtue' that element? The doctrine has a 
semblance of truth. Let us consider it for a moment. 

The word ' virtue' is sometimes used to denote — 
(1.) The higher principles and sentiments.^ (2.) Not 
seldom it is employed as a synonym for 'duty.' (3.) By 
Aristotle it is more accurately employed as signifying 
' a habit of mind in accordance with right reason.' All 
these different uses of the word arise from the differ- 
ent points of view from which the same object is looked 
at. The first-named of these uses represents its com- 
mon denotation ; the second use is the same definition 
looked at from the point of view of the law and obli- 
gation incident to the higher sentiments ; the third 
use implies the same definition, but looks at the 
higher sentiments as in a state of active operation, — 
regarding them as non-existent, except in so far as 
they make manifest their existence. To look at 
virtue, with Aristotle, as active, is manifestly more 
accurate than to view it in its relation to ruling senti- 
ments and maxims. But although Aristotle's defini- 
tion of it approximated to the truth, it did not select 
from the phenomena of virtuous action its essential 
characteristic. The essence of virtue is this, that it 

^ Cicero constantly employs the word in tliis sense, wliicli is certainly 
not the true Stoic sense of the word, though embraced in it. 



110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

is the assertion of the supremacy of ivill, the assertion 
of the supremacy of free personality, the assertion of 
the supremacy of man, — all these phrases being of 
identical signification. To look at the acts of men in 
relation to the sentiments or principles which should 
govern these acts, is to look at them in their relation 
to primary and ulterior ends and motives — to look at 
them purely psychologically. Neither ends nor motives 
take us out of the region of natural history into that of 
morality-proper. Morality, if by that ^Ye understand 
the approvableness of the agent energizing, is pre- 
dicable of man only through the duality of human 
nature, and begins with the assertion of freedom over 
threatened subjugation, of Will (will and free-will being 
here held to be convertible terms) over tendency. The 
free assertion of will over tendency — this is Virtue. This 
free exertion of will over subject sensations, yields, as 
we have showm in the chapter on Sanctions, a peculiar 
and intense felicity, quite apart from the ulterior end 
of the energizing. It is the ground of the feelings of 
manhood and dignity in their purest forms. The man 
who has so disciplined his nature that he can put forth 
his will, at will, for the repression of rising passion, 
the direction of ever-varying sensations, and the con- 
trol of tumultuous emotions, is alone truly a king, 
truly happy, truly rich. Here we find ourselves on 
Stoic ground. 

But it is manifest that this free exertion of sove- 
reign will may have for its motive the desire of an 
end in itself mistaken. The riofht direction of its 



THE SUPREME GOOD. Ill 

force is to be found outside itself, in the character of 
the end of its activity (subjective and objective). And 
the general and supreme end of life is to be discerned 
only in and through the particular ends of each indivi- 
dual act. That particular end or standard ^\Q have 
already ascertained to be the fehcity of man ; and this 
necessitates a conclusion regarding the general and 
ultimate end of human actions and life, namely, that it 
is Felicity. Where the conflict of ends and motives 
distracts the will, the characteristic of that end or motive 
by which we determine its rightness, as compared with 
other possible motives, is the higher quality or greater 
quantity of felicity inherent in it, and this whether 
the act be transitive or intransitive. 

That concurrence of the whole nature in the per- 
manent dominance of the higher and governing 
fehcities (sentiments), and of quantitative considera- 
tions ; in other words (to adopt secondary instead of 
primary language), that perfect fashioning of the will 
in accordance with law as it emerges in consciousness 
after the right has been discriminated, is Happiness ; 
and this it is which is the end of man's life. Moral 
Happiness, that is to say, not happiness in the vulgar 
and ancient Epicurean sense of content, or of a diffu- 
sion of pleasurable sensations over the consciousness. 
A man cannot be content in this the Epicurean sense 
who is morally unhappy ; but a man may have 
attained the supreme moral happiness, and yet be in 
all other respects most miserable. Our doctrine is of 
the Porch, not of the Garden. The happiness which 



112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

is the end of rational life is a never-ceasing effort, a vic- 
tory constantly repeating itself. Virtue, consequently, 
is the pre-condition of that happiness ; — nay, ranging 
ourselves on the side of Stoicism, we might almost say 
that virtue is the only end, but this in a peculiar sense 
— a sense which, doubtless, underlay this lofty con- 
summation of the ethical thought of antiquity. The 
sense I mean is this, that the only good possible to man, 
as man, as a self-conscious personality, is Virtue. All 
other pleasure or pain, preferables or non-preferables, 
revolve round this central personaHty, and assault its 
peace with suggestions of passion. But high above 
these perturbations stands the self-determining will, 
and finds, in its own free loyalty to virtue and its 
harmony with nature, a profound calm — the sole good. 
This ''noble rage' of Virtue can make the disciplined 
philosophic man affirm his supreme happiness in the 
supreme good, even when in the Bull of Phalaris. It 
carries with it, when rightly understood, as a strictly 
logical consequence, that pain is no evil.^ 

It is a mistake to suppose that Zeno ignored self- 
referent happiness. There seems to be no evidence 
that the Stoic was so alarmed at this word as certain 
modern ethicists. He opposed Virtue and Pleasure, not 
Virtue and Happiness. The supreme good, or rather the 

1 Cicero, with respect be it said, did not seem to understand tlie 
doctrine ; and in liis attempt at refutation resorts to a kind of popular 
cliaff. Our larger experience of life, and our broader Christian ethics, 
render Stoicism in its ancient purity bencefortli impossible. Even Butler, 
usually esteemed a Stoic modified by the new influence of Christian 
doctrine, is so only by mistake, — his scheme of ethical thought according 
more directly with that of the Peripatetics. 



THE SUPEEME GOOD. 113 

only good {id quod est natura ahsolutwn), so far from 
being dissociated from happiness, is the supreme joy 
of the rational soul. 

Thus, if we take the more profound view of man's 
nature, and fix our eyes on the personality and ener- 
gizing of the moral agent, the supreme good is the 
assured and unwavering triumph of will or virtue. It 
is self-determination victorious over tendency. If, 
however, we fix our eyes on the end and object of 
energizing, the supreme good is happiness. The former 
is the formal, the latter the reaZ, end of human life. 
In the distinction thus evolved lies probably the con- 
cihation of (modern) Stoic and (modern) Epicurean, 
who persist in gazing at different sides of the same 
shield. 

When it is further affirmed that God is the Supreme 
end, it is meant that the supreme happiness is the love 
of God. But when we break do^^m this most general 
of aU moral utterances into its details, it may be in- 
terpreted thus, that through the mysterious utterance 
of inviolable law, the Eight and the Wrong are affirmed 
in the consciousness of man by direct intervention of 
Divine Power, and that the Divine Will so revealed 
is our end. If this be meant, we dismiss this doc- 
trine of the Supreme good as already disposed of 
in a previous chapter. But if it be meant that 
the WiU of God, as it is made known in the constitu- 
tion of man and of nature and in the deahngs of God 
with man, is our final end and sovereign good, we 

H 



114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

gladly welcome the doctrine. But while doing so, we 
note that we have already found that the Divine 
Will, in its relation to man, can be discriminated only 
by the test of human felicity, and that therefore, in 
conforming our wills to those sentiments and those 
laws of conduct which can alone insure moral happi- 
ness, we obey the Will of God, and admit Him to the 
government of our souls. 

If it be further meant, that we are to carry up into 
the Divine essence the laws of rational life, which we 
have discovered by the help of the instruments which 
our Creator has put into our hands, and contemplate 
them there in their infinite perfection as expressions 
of the surpassing and inefiable glory of the eternal 
Source of life and light and love, and from the contem- 
plation draw strength for the daily task of waiting, 
watching, and working, we discern in this lofty view 
of the purpose of man's existence a perfect harmony 
with the doctrines laid down in the previous chapters, 
at the conclusion of each of which we could in all 
sincerity write the words, ' The chief end of man is to 
glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.' 



CHAPTER XIV. 

On Justice. 

diroXis 6tuj to 1X7} koKov ^vvecm. — Soph. Antig. 370. 

If a distinct Sentiment of Justice exist, it is itself the 
measure of the just in acts ; and by it the human 
mind may instantaneously discern a quality in the 
relations of acts and agents, which it at once signal- 
izes as satisfying or offending the sentiment. But if 
there be no instinctive sentiment of justice identical 
with or similar to that intense and vivid notion which 
almost all men have of the just, we are not driven, as 
is too commonly supposed, to seek the source of that 
notion outside ourselves, and in our experience of that 
kind of conduct which promotes the general well- 
being. There is another alternative, the alternative 
of a complex sentiment. Two elements may in mind, 
as in matter, go to form a tertimn quid, which is as 
distinct in all its properties, and possesses as distinct 
an individuality, as either of its constituent elements. 
Water is neither oxygen nor hydrogen ; nor the two 
regarded as one : but water. At the same time, a 
complex third in the region of sentiment and emotion 



116 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

cannot possess more authority among the forces of 
mind, than the elements out of which it springs. 

Men originally associated together, not for the 
sake of ulterior advantages, but for the sake of 
association. Such an association necessarily brought 
with it a conflict of individual will and interest, and 
Justice, as a fact of external relation, and as a senti- 
ment, thereupon began to grow. But at this point we 
pause to ask the question, Out of what did it grow ? 
Its origin was unquestionably this external necessity ; 
necessity, that is to say, of subordinating the satisfac- 
tion of the needs and desires of each individual (since 
limitation was an inevitable condition of the social 
state) to the general well-being. It had of course been 
already tacitly assumed that the benefits of association 
were likely to exceed those of isolation. No sooner 
have we the faintest beginnings of an authoritative, 
though unwritten regulation of the more palpable 
relations of each to each and all, than we have Justice, 
in the form of custom-law, as an objective fact ; 
and the social or gregarious agglomeration of men 
becomes a civil polity. Such is the origin of Justice 
as an external fact ; but does the perception of 
these external limitations, and of their relation to 
the general well-being, constitute the source or foun- 
tain (as distinguished from the beginning or origin) 
of the sentiment of justice ? And do the authoritative 
enforcements of the will of society constitute, when 
notionalized by the intellect, the obligation of justice ? 

With these introductory remarks, let us proceed 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 117 

to a short consideration of the questions which they 
suggest : — 

Under right transitive acts falls that subordinate 
species which we distinguish by the appellation Just. 
Acts of this species differ from other right transitive acts 
in this, that while these contemplate simply the felicity 
of others, those contemplate that felicity under certain 
restrictions imposed by the 'rightful' claims of the 
agent himself, and of all others coming within the 
scope or incidence of the act. In a previous part of 
this essay we have affirmed, without attempting to 
prove, that the various constituents of a man's indi- 
vidual nature have a legitimate right to satisfaction 
inherent in the fact of their existence. This doctrine 
may be extended to the persons composing a society 
or State. But it no more follows that all the persons 
composing the body politic have equal rights as 
^persons, than that all the constituent elements of a 
man's nature have equal claims to consideration as 
impulses or sentiments. The internal moral economy 
is an economy of higher and lower, superior and 
inferior. The sentiments govern, and even of these 
certain are supreme. The internal economy of man, 
accordingly, is a limited Monarchy, not a Democracy 
— no, nor yet a Kepublic. The view of Justice to 
which we are thus led is not unimportant. We are 
able to set aside the popular fallacy that Justice, or 
the just class of acts, are those which endeavour to 
promote the general felicity on the basis of equality. 
Each individual in the body politic has only that 



118 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

amount of equality with every other individual which 
most surely promotes the greatest happiness of the 
whole, emphatically including, under the head of 
Happiness, the highest moral condition — the virtue 
of the whole. Might we venture to lay violent hands 
on a word already appropriated, we would exclude 
equality from the notion of justice, and substitute 
equity in the signification of. Equality restricted 
by a regard to the virtue and happiness of the whole. 
In this definition there is furnished to us the criterion 
of Justice. The just act accordingly must be a 
difiicult thing to determine in any given case, if it 
be a new one, although the large accumulation of 
ready-made secondary precepts which we inherit 
renders the perception of the just a rapid and easy 
process in all the more ordinary concerns of life. It 
is with these secondary maxims and generalizations, 
written or unwritten, that the administrator of law 
has to do. It follows also, from what we have said, 
that Justice is necessarily progressive, that it must 
give to political organizations and social convention- 
alities difierent forms at difierent epochs, and that the 
just form of internal polity must always be largely 
dependent on national character and on national cir- 
cumstances and conditions. 

It does not follow, from what has been said, that 
we quarrel with the phrase — ' The eternal principles of 
immutable j ustice.' The phrase is, however, obj ectionable 
because it is made up of the most general notions, and 
requires to be taken to pieces before being used either 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 119 

as an argument or as the defiant motto of a party. We 
believe that what is really meant by the phrase is, that 
the sentiment of Justice (whether it be simple or com- 
plex) is as eternal and immutable as man. So long as 
two rational beings of the same hind exist in relation, 
and are endowed with the social instinct, there will exist 
the fact and the sentiment of justice. We say of the 
same hind ; for we must pause before we transfer our 
notion of justice into the consciousness of beings 
transcending man. Again, the obligation of justice 
is as ' eternal and immutable ' as man ; and further, 
the source of that obligation, we maintain and shall 
show, arises primarily out of the constitution of 
the agent, and is based on sentiment. This we are 
bound to show, if the theory which we have ad- 
vanced in past chapters is not to fall vanquished 
before this, the great crucial test of the accuracy of 
all moral speculation — -the fact and. act of Justice. 

We have already explicitly or implicitly considered 
both Justice and Benevolence in relation to the felicity- 
criterion of Eightness, to the sanctions of Eightness, 
and to the legitimate supremacy of the Transitive 
over the Intransitive felicities and duties. Further, 
in the chapter on Ends and Motives we endeavoured 
to show that, wherever a sentiment is concerned in 
transitive acts (and it matters not whether the senti- 
ment be simple or complex), there are to the moral 
agent twofold ends of action, both falling under 
the criterion of Felicity : first, action in accordance 



120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

with the higher sentiment, as that is qualitatively 
discriminated — let us suppose it to be the sentiment 
of Benevolence — and action in accordance with the 
end of Benevolence ; namely, the felicity of Man. If 
the agent satisfy the former end, he is right and ap- 
proved ; but he may do so, we found, and yet fail, 
through ignorance or inadvertence, to give eflfect to the 
ulterior objective purpose of that subjective end — the 
felicity of Man effected in certain individuals. That 
felicity depends on his knowledge of human nature, 
and of the circumstances of the particular human nature 
which he may be endeavouring to benefit. So, in the 
case of Justice : when the deliberations of Eeason issue 
in the election by the will of the active desire of the 
Just, that is to say, the desire to satisfy the sentiment 
of Justice, the moral agent has discharged his duty,^ 
but he may yet, in perfect good faith, give effect to 
the sentiment in an unjust act. The just act, as we 
have shown, can be discerned ultimately (and, where 
traditionary maxims fail us, only) by having strict 
regard to the end of just acts — to Justice objectively 
considered in relation to the criterion of it. That 
criterion we have shown to be the highest happiness 
of the body politic, and it may be described as the 
equitable (not the equal) distribution of felicities 
among men bound together by social sympathy and 
common interests. 



^ I need scarcely point out that the desire of Goodwill, or the desire of 
Justice, imply a bond fide effort to ascertain the true direction of the 
benevolent or just act. 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTTCE. 121 

Having made this general statement respecting 
the Just objectively considered in relation to its stan- 
dard, and the Just subjectively considered in relation 
to sentiment, let us now attempt to analyse the sen- 
timent of Justice, in order to find wherein lies the 
primary obligation to effect a mental union with this 
sentiment as the motive-power of a large proportion of 
our transitive acts, and further, how it comes that the 
sentiment of justice dominates over all others, and 
avenges all attempts to override it on any pretext 
whatsoever, however lofty the pretext may be. 

It is scarcely necessary to say, after what has been 
written, that we cannot find in man a simple senti- 
ment of justice which defies further analysis, and 
which unerringly detects the equitable in the relations 
of man and man, by means of a mysterious arbitrary 
power of discrimination and a consentaneous utterance 
of obligation. Were it so, a survey of the past and 
present would convince us that the sentiment of justice 
must be blind indeed in a difi'erent sense from that 
which is meant by the allegorist. 

Let us trace, if we can, the natural history, and in 
that history unveil the nature, of the sentiment. For 
we cannot rest satisfied, as the Utilitarian does, with the 
explanation that the feelings which surround, support, 
and confirm the j ust sentiment, also constitute it. In the 
doing of the just act we find, and the Utilitarian also 
finds, the feeling of law obeyed, the feeling of approba- 
tion secured, and the satisfaction which accompanies 
the success of an intellectual efi'ort to weigh and de- 



122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

termine relative claims ; but besides all this there is a 
residuum of feeling unexplained. The moral analyst 
who can detect in the sentiment of justice nothing- 
save the above feelings operating under the potent 
sanctions imposed by society for the common benefit, 
combined with an intense feeling of di personal stake in 
the common weal, has omitted from his analysis the 
chief constituent element — that which alone initiates, 
vindicates, and establishes justice, both as a moral fact 
and as a sentiment — in truth, its very essence. 

Let us fall back, then, on our presumed first social 
experience of a wrong — the case of a man who is a 
witness of the forcible abstraction of the axe of one of 
his fellows. Up to this moment the sentiment and act 
of justice have been, for want of occasion, as impos- 
sible as seeing is without light. Nay, the judgment 
which the spectator forms of the act before him is true 
only in so far as he has himself, in his own person, 
already experienced assault, or vividly imagined it. 
In that personal assault — real or imagined — what is 
the sufferer s mental history ? Whether -the assault 
takes the form of the infliction of pain in the form 
of doing direct injury to his body, or, as in the 
supposed case, of abstracting an implement of use, or 
in any other way repressing his powers or impeding 
the gratification of his desires, it stirs a feeling of 
reaction, accompanied by a turbulence of emotion 
which we call anger. This feeling of turbulent re- 
action does not exhaust the mental phenomenon ; for 
to the consciousness of self as a free spontaneous 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 123 

actor, there belongs as an essential accompaniment a 
feeling of the right to free action. The power and 
impulse to do carries with it the right to do. We 
may not be able to detect this feeling of right to free 
action as implied in the mere consciousness of self as 
a free agent, but that it is a necessary and invariable 
accompaniment of this consciousness will not be 
questioned. It is proved — (1.) By our own con- 
sciousness that any limitation of our free activity 
excites a feeling of personality or right disregarded ; 
(2.) By the observation of men in a primitive savage 
state ; (3.) By our observation of children ; (4.) By 
the impossibility of otherwise accounting for the fact 
of the desire for retaliation or revenge v\^hich resides 
in the mind of him who has been injured. 

Animals, it is true, seem to share with man this 
sense of personal right in a vague form. Man has 
this advantage, however, that he can fix the feeling 
permanently in consciousness as an object of thought, 
and give it a notional entity. 

Now, the feeling of pain inflicted by an aggressor, 
the turbulent reaction of self against that aggressor, 
the feeling of right to free action violated, are, through 
the power of intelligent sympathy, known to have 
existence in those who may be seen to be similarly 
abused. In and through others, we a second time 
know the pain, the reaction, the feeling of persona- 
lity violated — that is, of personal rights infringed. 
These things are discerned to be occurring in their 
experience, as they have occurred or may be ima- 



124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

gined to occur, in ours. But the mere sympathetic 
perception of the right to the free action of self seen 
to exist in others, will not of itself stir us to react with 
them against the aggressor, nor will it teach or move 
us to regard or respect those rights. Sympathy stops 
short at the knowledge that another perceives as we 
perceive, feels as we feel ; but the community of anger 
and resistance which we have wdth the oppressed 
against the oppressor implies something more : there 
is necessary an interest in the oppressed as a fellow- 
being, — in other words. Benevolence. While sym- 
pathy gives us the hioidedge that others, as well 
as we, feel that they have personal rights, there is 
nothing in this to establish a community of emotion 
between us and them. We require the introduction 
of some other instinctive feeling, namely. Benevolence 
or Goodwill. 

But if Goodwill underlies our sympathy with the 
emotion of one whose personality is seen to be in- 
fringed, and is an indispensable condition of that 
community of emotion, how much larger must be the 
part played by this sentiment in determining an agent 
to the doing of the just act, when by that act he sacri- 
fices certain lower, but desirable, felicities of his own ! 

The Sentiment of Justice, then, viewed psycho- 
logically, is a complex sentiment, and is primarily 
resolvable into — (1.) A feeling of personal right expe- 
rienced in self, and recognised tln?ougli sympathy as 
existing in others ; (2.) The sentiment of good^vill with 
respect to those in whom a right resides ; (3.) It 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 125 

receives adventitious support also from the intellectual 
conception of equality of magnitudes and numbers. 
Speaking generally, tlie sentiment of justice is merely 
the sentiment of goodwill restricted by a conception 
of the relative rights of the objects of goodwill, and 
including the rights of the moral agent himself. 

What are those rights ? To answer this, we must 
revert to our definition and criterion of Justice 
objectively considered. And it seems to us that 
if the above be the psychological character of the 
sentiment of Justice, we are supported by it in our 
definition of justice in its objective aspect, as being 
' the equitable distribution of felicities.' Not the equal 
distribution : equity is not the same thing as equality. 
By ' equitable distribution' is meant such a distribu- 
tion as satisfies the demands of the respective or 
relative rights of the objects of justice. If asked by 
what criterion we test the equitable rights of indi- 
viduals ; we answ^er : by the positive law^, written and 
unwritten, of the system of society of which the 
individuals form a part. If asked further by what 
criterion we test equitable rights, apart from the posi- 
tive institutes of society, — that is to say (to use the 
old pln:ase), equitable rights as they exist 'in the 
nature of things ;' we answer : by the test of felicity 
in this pecuHar sense, 'The highest possible happiness^ 
of the greatest possible number.' 

^ The word happiness meaning, as we have frequently had occasion 
to repeat, the ' happiness of Man. ' 



126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

In the course of our analysis we have pointed out 
certain confusions of thought and language prevalent 
in ethical discussions. A confusion not less important 
than any which have come under our notice, is the con- 
founding of the just act and the right act. By the 
* right' act (viewed teleologically, whether its end be 
attained in the subject acting, or in another), is meant 
that act which accords with the standard of acts, the 
felicity of the norm of man viewed psychologically. 
But the Just is a species of the Eight, and is not to 
be confounded with the generic term. By the 'just' 
act is meant (or ought to be meant) the right or 
equitable distribution of felicities ; that is to say, of 
those things already ascertained to he teleologically 
right, — this distribution having for its criterion or 
standard the highest possible happiness of the greatest 
possible number. 

Happiness in respect of what ? In respect of the 
share of each in the "prima vitce — e.g. Corn. If this be 
the particular felicity which is at any one time under 
consideration for distribution, the answer is 'Yes,' 
provided that the giving of corn, on the principle of 
the 'greatest possible share to the greatest possible 
number,' does not conflict with some higher felicity of 
man, and so subvert our criterion. It may be neces- 
sary, in order to secure this final end, to give one 
man (or allow him to take, which is the same thing) 
ten times as much as another ; for, ' Man does not live 
by bread alone.' It appears, then, that we must 
interpret the word ' possible' as containing implicitly 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 127 

this sense : ' as great a share as is consistent with those 
other felicitous conditions which make up the whole 
life of man, and given to as many as will admit of the 
production in any society of the greatest possible 
quantity of the highest possible quality of life/ This 
is the criterion, not of morality, as some suppose, but 
only of distributive morality. That act, and that act 
only, is declared to be just and equitable, not which 
promotes the w^ell-being of society, but which so dis- 
tributes recognised felicities as to promote the highest 
possible well-being of the greatest possible number. 
By this ' natural ^ standard all positive institutions are 
from time to time to be tested, — are always being 
tested, where thought and speech are free. 

Wherein, then, lies the Ohligation to acquire for 
our wills the sentiment of justice, with a view to the 
regulation of our transitive acts ? The primary obli- 
gation is inherent in that part of the complex senti- 
ment which lies alongside of the sense of rights, and 
gives that sense universality, namely. Benevolence. 
It is to the high felicity yielded to the agent by good- 
will that we appeal, as the ultimate ground of our 
demand that he shall be just. If it be replied : On 
w^hat ground is an individual to sacrifice his mate- 
rial and other felicities in order to do the just act ? 
we avoid repetition by referring back to the Chapters 
in which we treat of ' The Sanctions of the Eight' and 
' The Gradation of Felicities with reference to the 
Supreme authority of the Sentiment of Justice.' 



128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

Let US now look for a moment at some practical 
consequences of the above doctrine. The just or 
equitable act is always a complicated matter, even 
where positive law precludes or supersedes original 
investigation ; how much more comphcated when we 
have to deal with it in relation to the foundations of 
society, or to the introduction of any new rule of 
social conduct or of political administration ! By 
what expedients are we most likely to secure that the 
just shall at all times, and in all places, be done ? The 
answer to this question is given in the Science of 
Politics. But within the legitimate range of Ethics, 
we have something to affirm on the subject, suggested 
by the natural history of the growth of the sentiment 
of justice in the minds of men. The uninstructed 
man, still groping his way to the just act towards his 
fellows, is in point of fact settling for himself the 
restrictions under which his own personality must 
live and work. Intelligent sympathy may yield him 
the knowledge of that which another conceives to be 
his rights. But unless this sympathetic knowledge 
be supported and stimulated by Goodwill, the ever- 
present, ever-dominant self would bear down the 
claims of others, when they were in antagonism with 
its own, and Justice, if it grew at all, would grow 
laboriously out of a stiff and arid soil. The senti- 
ment of Goodwill, however, interwoven into his con- 
stitution and coming into life there as surely as the 
appetitive desires, is early active in greater or less 
degree, and binds him to his fellow-men; while the 
reaction of respect for the rights of others on the 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 129 

preservation of his own rights, confirms the teachings 
of Goodwill. A lofty and tranquil mind, in which 
Goodwill existed in full counterpoise to self, might, 
in most cases, approximate to just perceptions ; but 
turbulence of feeling, and obtuseness of intellect, con- 
stantly tend to disturb the true balance. Accordingly, 
the resistance of others against a man, as, in the earlier 
stages of civil society, he moves on in his career 
of universal self-assertion, is the only permanently 
effective agency for arresting him. Others will not 
be slow to let their fellow-man know that his acts 
impede or curtail what they believe to be their 
own rightful felicities ; while, on the other hand, 
the agent's ever-extending experience of intrusions 
on his own sphere will reveal to him those acts 
which he considers to be wrongful limitations of his 
legitimate activity, and thereby enable him more 
fully and clearly to understand similar feelings in 
others. Thus, by action and resistance, and the 
retaliation of one upon another, each is taught, 
through fear of the ultimate consequences to him- 
self, lessons which support and stimulate the Good- 
will which binds man to man : and the result is 
an abstinence, by common consent which soon be- 
comes common law, from certain classes of acts, 
which, directly or indirectly, affect society injuriously. 
Lying, stealing, killing, maiming,^ etc., are put under 
the ban of social disapprobation and the penalty 

^ It is not pretended that we here exhaust the immoral elements in 
these acts : we speak of them merely in their social relations. 

I 



130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

of law, which is merely the civil or corporate affir- 
mation of moral force. Those in whom Sympathy 
and Groodwill and Intelligence are weak, are guided, 
controlled, or coerced by men of broader sympathies, 
a more potent sentiment of goodwill, and keener 
perceptions of ultimate issues. Future generations, 
trained to obedience, accept as Laiv what in earlier 
times has perhaps been laboriously established ; and, 
starting from a higher platform than their prede- 
cessors, are able to advance to further and more 
refined perceptions of the individual and the common 
wellbeing, until the moral delicacies of spiritualism 
are elaborated, and enter into the common life as 
dominating forces. 

If these be the aids, and this the history of 
the growth of practical justice in the elementary 
stages of civil society and in children, it follows 
that no elevation or tranquillity of mind among the 
few is likely permanently to maintain justice in a 
State, unless the assertion of individual rights, or 
supposed rights, be free ; and, on the other hand, it 
is equally manifest that the multitude of contending 
claimants are not likely to devise equity under the 
pressure of unsatisfied desires, without the guidance 
of the composing, tranquillizing, far-seeing powers of 
minds born to wisdom, or trained to virtue and to broad 
views of human needs and possibilities. The barque 
of Justice is one difficult to steer, not so much because 
of the shoals and rocks which beset its course, as of the 
constant deflection, through the disturbing attraction 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 131 

of self, of the needle by whose means we steer — 
whether that self be an individual self, or a class self, 
or a corporate self 

We have now considered shortly the Sentiment of 
Justice, the Criterion of Justice, the Obligation of 
Justice, and the practical working of Justice in con- 
nexion with its growth in society. 

We might here stop, and avoid or evade polemics. 
But this question of Justice stands out from others so 
conspicuously, in consequence of its supremacy over 
the sentiments of man, and in the practice of life, that 
it affords an opportunity of setting in a clear light 
the antagonism in which the results of the preceding 
analysis stand to the Utilitarian doctrine. 

The existence of the sentiments is not denied by 
the most competent Utilitarians of the modern school. 
They are simply accounted for, and assigned a place 
as the handmaids of Morality. They are not, how- 
ever, admitted to constitute the criteria of the conduct 
of the moral agent, nor is Utility in the sense of the 
' happiness of Man'^ discerned to be the criterion only 
of the true objective operation of the elected senti- 
ment when it moves the will. Morality and obliga- 
tion proper, we maintain, exhaust themselves in the 
act of effecting a mental union with the right senti- 
ment, the rightuess of the act which emanates from 

^ The Utilitarians do not even admit that the happiness of man is the 
criterion of conduct : they are, on the contrary, very careful to point out 
that the criterion is the 'Happiness of Mankind.' 



132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

the sentiment being an infinitely important, but, strictly 
speaking, an ulterior and extra-moral question. 

Not only the strictly logical Utilitarian, but those 
Utilitarians who, like Mr. Mill, recognise sentiment 
and also the quality of felicities as elements in happi- 
ness, will have the same quarrel with our statement 
of the criterion of that species of right act which 
is called Just as they have wdth the criterion of right 
Transitive acts generally. They will have a similar 
objection to the doctrine here laid down regarding 
the primary source of the Obligation of the Just. 
With respect, however, to the criterion of the just act 
(which emanates from the sentiment, although it is 
not regulated by it) objectively or teleologically 
considered, there is no essential discrepancy between 
the doctrine which we have propounded and that of 
the modified New-utilitarianism, if it be liberally inter- 
preted. It is necessary, therefore, here to advert only 
to their doctrine respecting the primary source of the 
obligation of the just act ; and to do this in such a 
way as to bring into view the defects in their ex- 
position of the sentiment of justice. 

Both the old and new Utilitarian rest the obliga- 
tion of the just act, as of all morality, on external 
sanctions. The old Utilitarian finds law and obliga- 
tion in sanctions which originate in the will of others 
than the agent. The new Utilitarian adds, or may 
consistently add, to those outward penal sanctions, 
the inner reproaches of conscience, although he has not 
yet ventured to define what he means by these. He thus 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 133 

shows a disposition to approximate to the doctrine of 
subjective and sentimental obligation. But even he, by 
a strange and yet unexplained inconsistency, declines 
to admit any obligation or duty in those intransitive 
moral acts, which the enforcing will of others has no 
' right ' to interfere with, and if he class them among 
moralities at all, he does so in a peculiar sense. Two 
classes of forces, as we have already explained, enter 
into the notion and sense of law, namely, the Posi- 
tive or Attractive (felicity, subjective and objec- 
tive), and the Negative or Coercive (pain, subjective 
and objective). The new Utilitarian recognises, or 
may consistently recognise, the Coercive Force, in its 
full sweep ; the old Utilitarian sees law only in those 
objective and authoritative enforcements which accom- 
pany or folloiv the disapprobation of our fellow-men. 
This inadequate view of the obligation of Justice com- 
pels both schools of Utihtarians to look persistently only 
at the negative aspect of the sentiment, and to offer us 
a definition of the sentiment of Injustice for a defini- 
tion of the sentiment of Justice — practically identify- 
ing both with what is only a paxtial definition of the 
former, namely, the desire to inflict retaliatory punish- 
ment. The negative aspect of the sentiment is cer- 
tainly chronologically prior in the experience of man 
to the positive. But though it is thus the beginning 
or origin, it is not at all, therefore, the source or 
fountain, of the positive sentiment : that source we 
have defined to be Goodwill, limited by the sympa- 
thetic perception of rights in self and others. 



134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

It follows also from the view of obligation taken 
by both old and new Utilitarians, that the specific and 
differentiating element of a right or * rights' which 
enters into both the notion and the sentiment of 
Justice, is supposed to be adequately explained by 
saying that it is resolvable into ' an apprehended hurt 
to some assignable person, and a desire to punish/ ^ 
The vjJiole sentiment of justice, therefore, of which the 
notion or feeling of a right forms confessedly only a 
part, is now represented as differing from the latter 
solely in the fact of the superinduction of the social 
feeling. But inasmuch as the apprehension of a hurt 
to some assignable person involves the sympathy of 
the spectator, and inasmuch as sympathy, according to 
Mr. Mill, constitutes the essence of the social feeling, — 
the notion of a right in no respect differs from the 
sentiment of justice itself Thus the figure which it 
was necessary to add in order to complete the senti 
ment of justice is at best a cipher without a multi- 
plying power. 

As we have said before, the fact of a right is 
inherent in the fact of sentient life ; and to this it 
may be now added, that the notion or feehng of a 
right is the self-conscious perception of the fact of a 
right. Eight is profoundly ye ?^ by man as the motive- 
support of all action, until the unrestrained and rni- 
petuous career of self is interrupted by some external 
force when the feeling of a right becomes a knowledge 
of it. This order of human experience explains how it 

^ Mill's Utilitarianism , p. 78. 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. - 135 

is that tlie sentiment of justice takes its beginning in the 
feeling of injustice. It is this feeling of a right, too, 
which gives its peculiar intensity to the sentiment of 
justice, and with good reason, for its intensity is the 
intensity of life, its extinction is death. Sympathy and 
benevolence next associate themselves with the notion 
of a right, socialize the notion, and transform it into 
the complex sentiment of justice. This history of the 
sentiment shows that it is possible for a moral agent 
to feel concern for the rights of others quite indepen- 
dently of his own share in the general security, which, 
according to any possible Utilitarian scheme he could 
not feel, except as the victim of an amiable delusion. 



S UPPLEMENTA R Y. 

The strict Utilitarian may have his argument very favourably, 
though concisely, stated thus :— 

(1.) Those acts sue just, that is, based on an equitable consideration 
of the rights of others, which promote the wellbeing of society as a 
whole. (2.) Unjust acts are those which are in a like manner hurt- 
ful. (3.) The wise who happen to be also at the time the 
strong, if not the majority, perceiving this, attach pains of body and 
the abrogation of personal rights to the doing of the unjust act. 
(4.) Thereby (and in other collateral ways) a sentiment of obliga- 
tion and law is created in the minds of men, in connexion with the 
just, (5.) The personal 'conscience' which follows, is substantially 
this, that in doing the just act, a man has a feeling of felicity in 
having obeyed a law imposed from without, and thereby having 
escaped certain penalties. This position may be thus illustrated : — 

If we imagine a hunter who declines to divide the roe which he 
has caught in company with another but weaker fellow- huntsman, 



136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

commanded to share the spoil, the following colloquy might fol- 
low : — 

A. Why should I do so ? 

B. Because it is the just thing to do. 

A . What do you mean by a Just act 1 

B. An act which is based on a recognition that others have a 
right in that which your superior strength makes you imagine to be 
wholly yours. 

A. But if I can admit no such right, — indeed, can see only that 
/ have a right to all I can get and keep, — what then '? 

B. Only this, that the just act promotes the wellbeing of man- 
kind, that is to say, in the present instance, the happiness of the 
society of which we form a part, while the unjust act which you 
propose to do is hurtful to man. 

A. Which means, I suppose, that the majority or the stronger 
portion of society have banded together to make it obligatory on me 
to give up something which I have the power of making my own, 
for the sake of the general wellbeing ? 

B. You may so put it. 

A. I will not question the wisdom of the majority in so con- 
cluding ; but I do not agree with them : and I consider it to be 
a nefarious act to require me to sacrifice my immediate and un- 
questionable felicity to the felicity of others, however numerous. 

B. But we are the majority, and we have made both tacit and 
explicit arrangements to force you^ by the infliction of penalties on 
the unjust act. 

A. You may force and punish, but none the less do I consider 
my rights interfered with. I will do the act you in your own 
interest call 'unjust,' and afterwards submit to the punishment 
which unhappily I cannot evade. But note this: I am morally 
right notwithstanding. 

B. I am sorry we differ. But pause a moment and consider. 
Were all to act as you propose to act, the end would be, as expe- 
rience has amply shown, that you yourself, and your offspring, would 
ultimately have fewer roes than they can have under the social 
arrangement we call justice. [Here follows an explanation to show 
the benefits which the observance of justice ultimately confers on 
each individual of a society.] 



SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE. 137 

A. All that you have said amounts to this, that if I will take a 
long instead of a short view of my interests and rights, I shall ulti- 
mately not only have the whole roe which I now wish to keep (for 
this would manifestly be no inducement), but, either in myself, or in 
others whom I regard as part of myself, two roes. Now, had you 
said nothing about law and force, I might have been disposed to 
consider the proposition which you make, and to enter into a calcu- 
lation, but when I reflect that the majority of the men banded 
together in this valley, and calling themselves a tribe or a nation, 
have presumed to call themselves the wise of that nation, and have 
abused their greater strength to impose a law on me, which they call 
by a fine-sounding name — justice ; and which being interpreted in 
my individual case, means here and now, that I must, on pain of suffer- 
ing, give up half a roe in the expectation of getting back to-morrow 
or next week a whole roe or two roes, I resolve to resist this abuse 
of strength, and to keep the whole roe. Nay, apart from this con- 
sideration, I would have kept the whole roe, because I may die to- 
night or to-morrow, and my experience has taught me that a roe 
in the hand is worth two in the bush. 

But why do you laugh ? 

B. I see the force of your argument, but I cannot but laugh 
when I see such an exhibition of independence, seeing the much 
more potent argument — indeed, one quite convincing — behind you. 

A. What is this'? surrounded by armed men ! chains and 
manacles ! Are these for me, despot 1 

B. They are for you. And not only so, but your whole roe will 
be taken from you, and you will be confined in a dark dungeon, and 
you will get no roe-flesh, but only water and roots, and this for 
months to come, and — 

A. Stop, stop ! May I still be 'just 1 ' 

B. You may. 

A, I will. 

B. Be it so. 

In the above colloquy a strict Utilitarianism (it seems to me) ex- 
hausts its arguments. The first stage of departure from the strict 
basis of a rigid Utilitarianism, is that which, throwing aside the 
doctrine of a purely animal gregariousness, or species of tacit, ' social 
compact,' as the foundation of human society — a compact arranged 



138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

with the view of securing in permanence for the great majority two 
roes where otherwise there would only be at best one, — finds this 
foundation in the instinctive social sympathy with which man is 
endowed, and which enables his larger intelligence to realize the 
felicity of others as well as his own, and so to grasp the general 
good, and to see in that general good the good of each individual. 
But this intense social sympathy, while undoubtedly facilitating the 
gradual and silent growth of compact in the form of laws to secure 
justice, and thus obviating difficulties which might otherwise be in- 
superable, cannot make any individual desire or care for the good of 
another. It is a very common but serious error, to suppose that 
it can have this effect. Sympathy enables a being to realize in 
his own feeling and thought the feelings and thoughts of another : 
it thus facilitates the knowledge of the knowledge of others, but 
having done this its function ends. We cannot have ^jleasure in 
the life of others, or care in any sense for their rights or felicity, with- 
out bringing the sentiment of Goodwill to the help of the Utilitarian 
argument, and slipping it in as the moral foundation of the sentiment 
of Justice and the ^primary source of its obligation ; all other sanc- 
tions being adventitious and external to the primary sanction which 
has its origin in the sentiment alone. Nay, if the ultimate induce- 
ment to act justly be laid even on the love of the approbation of 
our fellow-men, we thus lay the ultimate sanction and source of 
obligation on sentiment. 

Similarly, we might evolve the Utilitarian notion of Chastity and 
its obligation, having special reference to David Hume's remarks on 
this subject. Beutham notwithstanding, we might call poetry to our 
aid here. A Utilitarian ethicist could never have written this : — 
' So dear to heaven is saintly Chastity, 

That when a soul is found sincerely so, 

A thousand liveried angels lackey her, 

Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt ; 

And in clear dream, and solemn vision 

TeU her of things that no gross ear can hear ; 

Till oft converse with heavenly habitants 

Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape 

The unpolluted temple of the mind, 

And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence, 

Till all be made immortal.' 

Milton's Com us. 



CHAPTER XY. 

Statement of Relative Position} 

The doctrine expounded in the preceding pages differs 
from Utilitarianism, because — (l.) It repudiates the 
doctrine that the criterion of the duty of a moral 
agent is the ' greatest happiness of the greatest 
number.' We have endeavoured to show that this 
magic phrase might possibly l)e a criterion of the 
distribution of felicities ; but that it is a blunder — 
the result of mental confusion — to imagine that a 
moral agent can by means of such a standard 
ascertain those acts which are right, good, moral. 
(2.) The improved form of this theory, that which 
explicitly affirms that the Utilitarian system embraces 
in its scope the higher happinesses, and admits differ- 
ences in kind (although it fails to give us any other 
means of computing these than the arithmetical), in 
point of fact transfers the criterion from the * greatest 

1 1 had intended liere to enter on a criticism of what might be regarded 
as the representative treatises on the philosophy of Ethics, but when I 
had proceeded some way T found that to do so adequately would involve 
an amount of disquisition which would carry me far beyond the proper 
limits of this Essay. I therefore here content myself with stating con- 
cisely — I trust not so concisely as to lead me unawares into a misrepre- 
sentation of others — the relation in which the doctrine propounded in the 
preceding chapters stands to the Utilitarian and Intuitional schemes of 
morahty respectively. 



140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

happiness of tlie greatest number' to the 'happiness 
of mankind/ But here the Utilitarian argument labours 
and halts, as in the first case it blundered. Nor can 
any one closely peruse the more recent Utilitarian 
writings without perceiving that they are constantly 
shifting their own standard — at one time calling on 
the reader to fix his attention on the 'happiness of 
mankind' — thus swamping the whole of morality in 
benevolence or justice ; at another time guiding them- 
selves and their readers by the hght of happiness, as 
discovered by the moral agent to exist in his own 
consciousness, or it may be in the norm of man. 
Now the individual consciousness of feHcity, and 
again the general happiness is appealed to. We have 
shown, on the contrary, that no other criterion of 
rightness and duty in acts and states of will exists than 
the felicity which by our di^inely appointed constitu- 
tion they yield, and that while quality of felicity deter- 
mines the relative supremacy of mutually opposing 
states of will, quantity determines all other possible 
dubitations. In the latter class of cases (quanti- 
tative) cultivated reason, in the former (qualitative) an 
instinctive sentient power of discriminating the higher 
and lower in sentiment and sensation, through the 
touchstone of felicity, is the guide of man. Accordingly, 
where questions of 'quahty' arise, man possesses a 
' moral sense,' that is to say, an instinctive dis- 
criminative faculty. The discrimination is effected 
through felicity. These qualitative and cpantitative 
standards are not to be found in ' mankind,' nor, save 



RELATIVE POSITION. 141 

temporarily, and for the passing occasion, in the con- 
sciousness of the moral agent, but in that consciousness 
as enlightened by inner observation and by outward 
experience of life, and by the discoveries and revela- 
tions of others — in the consciousness, that is to say, of 
each individual, in so far as he truly represents the 
norm of man. (3.) Further, the doctrine which we 
have expounded embraces within the sphere of obli- 
gatory morality and of moral discrimination those sub- 
jective acts which concern the agent alone, as well as 
those which, done by him, affect his fellow-men. Utili- 
tarianism, even in its best form, recognises the obliga- 
toriness of those acts only which have external sanctions. 
(4.) These differences necessitate a further divergence 
from Utilitarianism on the subject of obligation. The 
very highest form in which the obligatoriness of the 
moral act has been put by the writers of that school, 
apart from external and adventitious sanctions, is 
this, that it rests on a conviction of a community and 
harmony of aims and interests with our fellow-men — a 
form not essentially different from that given by David 
Hume. This theory of obligation is perhaps a necessary 
consequence of the Utilitarian theory of discrimination 
of the Right ; but it is inadequate, and exhibits its 
inadequacy in the fact that it is found necessary to 
restrict its operation to those duties or moralities 
which society may and can enforce, leaving outside 
the pale of morality-proper the subjective condition 
of a moral agent, and thereby excluding the sentiments 
as well as the quality of felicities from a place in a 



142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

moral system strictly so called. The sense of obligation, 
law, and duty, are tlius regarded as being merely the 
reproduction in thought of the penal laws of society. 
To consider this consequence of a strict Utilitarianism 
with the fulness which its importance merits, would 
be to enter on a criticism of the system which would 
carry us beyond our present purpose. Obligation and 
the ' idea' of duty, as understood by us, rest to some 
extent on the external sanctions of acts for support, 
but ^primarily arise out of the attractive force of the 
felicity of the moral act, which is thus discovered to be 
at once the end and law of man's constitution, a law 
which is further protected by the coercive force of the 
pains of disobedience. The doctrine on this subject, 
however, is of too much importance to admit of 
perfunctory summarizing, and we must therefore refer 
again to the chapters on the Sanctions of Morality, 
and the Sense of Law.-^ (5.) But the divergence of the 
results of the preceding analysis from Utilitarianism, 
old and new, is most strongly marked by the fact that 
the sentiments are admitted into our scheme as ends 
in themselves. (6.) Further, we think it will be 
found to flow from the definition of virtue and merit, 
given in the chapter on the Sanctions of Morality, 
that with the Utilitarian (who, in consequence of the 
connexion which subsists between his ethics and 
metaphysics, is for the most part a Necessarian), 

^ It is scarcely necessary to point out here tliat the sanctions derived 
from the will of God are as open to the Utilitarian as to any other 
school of moralists. 



HELATIVE POSITION. 143 

* Virtue^ can have no meaning except in so far as it 
is a short way of indicating ' the virtues' that is, the 
recognised secondary maxims of morality, and that it 
cannot be an end in itself, but at best simply a means 
to an ulterior end. Finally, the Utilitarian theory in- 
stinctively avoids the question of the conditions of 
human happiness, and thereby is constantly led to 
confound happiness or felicity, in the strictly moral 
(and Stoic) signification, the condition of which is 
always virtue, with happiness in the sense of rounded 
and complacent content. The fact that it avoids, if 
it does not abjure, this interpretation of moral happi- 
ness, does not alter the fact that the two significations 
of the word are not consistently distinguished in their 
writings, and that this confusion has been one cause of 
their evading the question of the nature of the moral 
energizing, and of their consequent failure steadily to 
keep in view the fact that moral happiness means more 
or less of personal suffering, and that the greater the act 
of virtue (strange as the contradiction may appear) the 
greater is the pain of the virtuous agent. Our diver- 
gence from the Utilitarian theory is further conspicu- 
ously visible in our treatment of the crucial question 
of Justice, in wdiich Utilitarianism-proper is made to 
reveal itself in its true colours as a system of objective 
criteria, and aims, and purely external sanctions. 

Let us now look for a moment at the opposing 
scheme from the point of view to which our analysis 
has led us. 



144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

The Intuitional ethicists, — represented, notwith- 
standing some confusion of thought (with respect be 
it spoken) and numerous defects in exposition, by 
Bishop Butler, — for the most part fail to mark the line 
which separates the theory of discrimination of the 
right from the theory of obligation to do the right. 
Again they confound the act of discrimination and 
the act of approval. Conscience is treated, now as a 
discriminative, again, without warning, as an autho- 
ritative faculty, and again as an approving faculty. 
They have this advantage, however, over Utilitarians, 
that they view morality more as it exhibits itself in 
the inner history of the moral agent than in its rela- 
tion to the rightness of acts, as acts. Hence they 
share with the Stoics a deeper insight into the moral 
constitution of man, and a loftier view of his moral 
aims and destiny. 

But, while they go deeper than the Utilitarians 
into the nature of man, and consequently into the 
nature of the moral energy, their partial view of 
the question at issue causes the Intuitionalists to 
stop short of an adequate analysis of the right 
act as such, and of the ultimate criterion of right- 
ness. They seem frequently to accept the derivative 
conscience as ultimate, without searching into the 
basis on which it rests. With this school, the 'con- 
science,^ or, as Butler calls it, ' the principle of 
reflection,' is a principle or faculty in man, distinct 
from other principles and faculties. This ' principle' or 
'faculty' discriminates, among various possible acts. 



INTUITIONALISM. 145 

that which is the Right. How does it do so ? By 
approving some and disapproving others. The feelings 
of approbation and disapprobation are thus identified 
with the ' principle of reflection.' Approval and dis- 
approval are of course impossible, save as the result of 
reflection : they are practically synchronous with it in 
all our ordinary moral judgments ; but to identify the 
two phenomena is to enter upon ethical investigation 
with a confusion which satiates all future argument. 
The moral phenomenon of approval or disapproval 
involvino' reflection, and recoo;nised as a constituent 
element in the moral economy of man by all moralists 
alike, we found, because of its universal recognition, 
to furnish the best starting-point for our analysis. 
But a little consideration of the patent facts of moral 
history soon revealed to us that the act of approba- 
tion did not emerge from consciousness, and ally itself 
mysteriously wdth certain acts and states of will rather 
than with others, thereby pointing the way in which 
man was to walk ; but that it was itself the conse- 
quence of a prior feeling — the feeling, namely, of 
felicity in the contemplated act. 

It further appeared, in the course of argument, 
that the moral act properly begins with dubitation, 
and that each passion, appetite, and sentiment is right 
(and 'a good') — that is, approved — until it conflicts 
with some other. Eeflective approbation attaches 
itself to an act to-day which to-morrow, in new cir- 
cumstances, is wrong. This fact points to a weakness 
in the doctrine that conscience, in the sense of a 

K 



14:6 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

reflex principle of approbation, ultimately discriminates 
the right act. The Intuitional school shut their eyes 
to this weakness, but, feeling vaguely the logical neces- 
sity under which their doctrine places them, they al- 
most invariably speak of the appetites and passions 
of man as bad and censurable, which in themselves 
they are not. It seems to us obvious that if reflex 
approbation or conscience has to determine which of 
two or more potential acts is right, in the sense of 
approvable, and which is wrong, it must be guided 
by some test outside itself; and that test can only be 
the qualitative and quantitative felicity which the 
constitution of man shows to belong to the respective 
acts which are claimants at the bar of will, and from 
time to time give it pause. 

Observe, however, that a ' conscience,' or ' moral 
sense' (prior to the derivative conscience), in the sense 
of an instinctive and inexplicable appreciation of 
quality in felicities, we have vindicated ; and, in this 
respect we are in antagonism to the theory of Utili- 
tarianism-proper, which reduces all moral distinctions 
to questions of quantity (only incidentally in its latest 
form recognising quality), as that is ascertained by 
intellect operating on experience past and present. The 
sense in which we affirm a directing conscience is the 
only sense (we are disposed to think) in which Intui- 
tionalists will permanently desire to maintain its ex- 
istence as distinct from the discursive operations of 
intellect. Our doctrine might be summarized thus : — 

III qualitative acts and states of ivill there is 



INTUITIONALISM. 147 

cm immediate, intuitive moral sense : in quantitative 
acts and states of luill there is a mediate, discursive 
moral "perception. Both alike discriminate the true 
end of moral energizing, and in that end detect 
im2^licit positive law. 

The theory of Obligation propounded by the In- 
tuitional school amounts to this, that apart from the 
extraneous sanctions of the right, we find the authori- 
tative obligation to prefer the right in the same 'reflex 
principle^ which has already discriminated what the 
right is. That the principle of reflex approbation, or 
conscience, carries with its discriminations the notion 
of obligatoriness or law, is assumed. ' The natural 
authority of the principle of reflection,' says Butler, 
' is an obligation the most near and intimate, the most 
certain and known.' Again, he says : ' Authority is 
implied in the very idea of reflex approbation.' There 
is a substantial truth about this position ; and although 
it assuredly fails, as the preceding chapters show, to 
render an account of the moral movements that trans- 
act themselves within us, it does so because the 
analysis suddenly stops short where it ought in truth 
to begin. To this authoritativeness, imperativeness, or 
obligatoriness, we have given as high and sacred a 
position in the mental economy as the most extreme 
Intuitionahst could desire. We have not, however, 
rested content with an assumption, but have analysed 
the sentiment and exhibited its history in conscious- 
ness, revealing its twofold source in the positive force 



148 THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS. 

of Attraction wliicli the Creator has miplanted in the 
higher or greater felicity, whereby we perceive it to 
be at once end and law of our moral economy, and in 
the negative force of Coercion, whereby the right is 
taught, protected, and supported, and driven home 
upon the consciousness of man. 

To enter further on these distinctions would be to 
engage in that detailed criticism of systems which we 
have resolved meanwhile to postpone. We would only 
refer back to the chapter on Justice for an illustration 
of the defective analysis of this sentiment by the In- 
tuitionalist as well as by the Utilitarian, and to the 
chapter on the Gradation of Felicities, as famishing, 
for both schools alike, the only adequate explanation, 
as it seems to us, of the relative obligation of prin- 
ciples of action, each in itself laudable. 

Nor can we conclude without alluding again in 
this connexion to our short explanation of Virtue, as 
apparently liberating that word from its vague, un- 
certain, and fluctuatiag application by both schools. 
That explanation enables us to bring the question of 
the sovereign Good to a clearer issue than hitherto, 
and leads up, with directness and simplicity, to the 
ultimate metaphysics of morality, namely, the ana- 
lytics of Will and Freedom, and of the connexion 
between freedom and man's connate tendency to 
e^oL — questions which culminate in a consideration of 
the means which the wise providence of the Creator 
has pro^^ded for the perfecting of human will. 

THE END. 



